Skip to content
Two years deep and finally these beloved KC wingdings have blessed us with a debut album. WB are quintessentially the RUSH of late 2010s punk.
Each member gets their due time to flex in almost every song and at their gigs you’ll get a headache if you try to figure out what they’re all doing. But damn it’s good. A real question mark band who can sure pen a tune. Electric.
Our take: Debut 12”-er from this band out of Kansas City who just so happen to be one of my very favorite punk bands going at the moment. Like society as a whole, punk rock seems to go through eras of conservatism and progressivism, and despite (or maybe because of?) the fact that the right-wingers seem to be ascendant in the United States’ wilder culture, we seem to be experiencing a moment in the punk scene when nothing is cooler than letting your freak flag fly. It seems to me like Warm Bodies are part of that wave… they don’t have obvious sonic antecedents and their riffs and rhythms are very non-intuitive. But on the other hand they’re very much a guitar-bass-drums-vocals rock band, albeit one who consistently defies and inverts your expectations of what a hardcore punk band should do. At its worst, this type of confrontational, counter-intuitive music can calcify into prog (indeed, Lumpy even drops a Rush reference in his description of the record), but in Warm Bodies’ hands the intricacy feels freeing… their ability to play their asses off and fuck with the established hardcore formula is more like Miles Davis and John Coltrane’s deliberate and inquisitive questioning of musical convention than, say, Rush or King Crimson’s more stifling and baroque approach. Why the fuck am I writing about Miles Davis and King Crimson in a description of a hardcore record? Well, I suppose because Warm Bodies create music that is challenging and interesting enough that you can appreciate on that level, but they’re also pretty killer if you just want to dance. And I can’t think of anything better than a band that leaves open the opportunity to choose for myself whether I want to be smart or dumb.