Gig review: White Denim at Brudenell Social Club, Leeds

“Ask me how I’m doing, I’m fantastic, man,” James Petralli barks at one stage during tonight’s sold-out show at the Brudenell.

It’s a line from (God Created) Lock and Key from recently released album 13, but the White Denim guitarist, singer and bandleader – originally from Texas but now based in LA – could easily be describing his current prevailing mood.

At various stages during tonight’s joyously energised performance, Petralli acts and moves like a musician who has finally been let out from the confines of a studio to ply his trade totally off the leash on stage, with all the potential for spontaneity and stretching out that playing in front of an audience brings.

Initiated by the restrictions on group work imposed by the covid pandemic, the last few White Denim albums have been assembled somewhat like musical puzzles, with Petralli gluing together contributions from remote contributors to create intricate, genre-bending contraptions that have forsaken the band’s scuzzy garage rock roots in favour of warm soulfulness and Beefheartian knottiness.

Backed by the long-standing, telepathically attuned four-piece White Denim live band, tonight’s two-hour performance provides a thrilling polar opposite to such painstaking studio surgeries.

Drawn from all corners of White Denim’s 20-year journey, the set touches on all nooks of the band’s genre-curious stylistic excursions: from touches of strutting funk and economically applied blue-eyed soulfulness (the positively swooning, falsetto-laced Street Joy) to almost jazz-hued proggy complexity, white knuckled boogie and slick classic FM rock.

A seemingly inexhaustible energy unites these disparate tendencies: songs frequently melt into one another, suggesting an enthusiastic impatience to avoid idling for even one minute as there are always more ideas, motifs and movements to present to tonight’s attentive, audibly appreciative crowd.

Occasionally, the band’s stellar technical proficiency and Petralli’s taste for structures that rarely settle for the most direct route result in tightly knotted, unpredictably careering songs that exchange emotional resonance for musical highwire acts which may verge on the alienating for listeners who aren’t impressed by complexity and skill alone.

Any misadventures into pure technical excellence are forgotten the moment Petralli turns to guitarist Ronan Delisle to unleash another pulverising jam rooted in the duelling guitar harmonics that fuelled southern rock legends à la the Allman Brothers Band.

A Night In Dreams boasts no fewer than three such off-script excursions: one infused with hypnotic forward-momentum of cosmic psych-rock, a pure melodic classic rock six-string exchange, and finally a jam doused in the highly inflammable petrol of greasy 1970s hard rock: a spot of white denim and leather, perhaps?

It’s this ability to switch from carefully constructed tightness to the looseness of risk-taking unscripted extemporisations that makes White Denim such a powerfully compelling live act.