WARM DRAG - S/T

Warm Drag are a musical two piece, a two-sided conversation,
two devils on your shoulders, one of them telling you
to take that drug, sleep with that person and steal that car,
the other devil whispering to hit the reverb pedal and turn
the volume all the way up. The band listens to both devils,
and they are bringing their samplers-and-switchblade
post-noir noise disco to audiences this summer, with their
self-titled debut on In The Red.
The two people in the band do specific things: Vashti
Windish sings, the way Siouxsie sang power, the way Nico
sang allure, the way Patti sang sex, while Paul Quattrone
makes the noise with two Akai MPC 1000 samplers. These
beats pummel or seduce, usually simultaneously, with
synths that soar like Morricone or pump like DAF, and
with gloriously twangy guitars that clang and echo like
Duane Eddy spiraling down a k-hole.
Windish and Quattrone have history. They’ve lived and
they’ve been in bands. Quattrone is a drummer in the current
powerhouse Oh Sees lineup, which should be enough of a
recommendation for anyone, but he’s also been in !!! and
Modey Lemon too. Windish cut her teeth in bands including
the K-Holes and Golden Triangle, back in her native New
York. A chance reunion in Los Angeles led Quattrone and
Windish to attempt the outlandish ambition of marrying
her love for the genre-defying genius of Blondie’s Parallel
Lines (the first cassette she ever owned) to Quattrone’s love
of The Bomb Squad’s production styles.
They’ve been winning over notoriously-inert Los Angeles
audiences for a year now. An early show caught the eye of
Ian Svenonius. “Their cut-up collage of electronic stompmusic
embodied everything people were searching for that
summer,” he remembers. “There were just two of them but
the sound was magnificent.”