Too Cold to Hold by Warmduscher
If a typical attribute of postpunk musicians is the ability to ponder the meaning and methods of making music while engaged in the act of making music, then Warmduscher belongs within the permeable boundaries of the subgenre. The London-based band’s fifth long-player, Too Cold to Hold, rarely stops moving and never stops thinking.
Even the opening—a drug trip narrated by Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh—is reflective as well as cosmic, the band’s comedown drone then quickly punching up into the jagged “Fashion Week,” in which Benjamin Romans Hopcraft’s bass and Adam J. Harmer’s guitar are rawer nerves against Clams Baker Jr.’s declamatory vocals.
More a talker-avec-rhythm than a singer, Baker Jr. holds attention with the confident intensity of an end-times prophet whose pulpit is under a stoplight at a busy intersection. Sometimes, the rest of Warmduscher is afternoon traffic speeding past him (some instrumental touches of “Top Shelf” could be horns blaring); other times, it’s too many headlights during a nighttime rain (the dark-ska brass of “Immaculate Deception”).
Besides Welsh, many other voices provide more obviously tuneful counterparts to Baker Jr.: French singer and DJ Coucou Chloe is an unsettlingly good electronic Nina Simone in “Cleopatras,” English neo-soul lady Lianne La Havas is aloofly erotic in “Body Shock,” and Janet Plant, from Australian electro-pop group Confidence Man, helps lighten the already breezy post-club pleasure of “Pure at the Heart.”
The production, overseen in part by Romans Hopcraft, keeps each instrument separate and distinct and simultaneously establishes each as part of a coherent whole. This not only gives a modern sheen to something like the glam-rock shimmy of “Staying Alive” but also keeps the message of each song potently audible.
As serious as that might seem, Too Cold to Hold closes with “Weeds in Your Garden,” a ragtime stroll that tips a straw boater to Warmduscher’s personnel, helpers, and listeners. Postpunk can ponder, and it can be polite and puckish.
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