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 (1978) (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 stomp-music embodied everything people were searching for that summer,' he remembers. 'There were just two of them but the sound was magnificent.