White Denim preview

White Denim
Metro, Chicago
Friday, April 11, 2008

CDs? White Denim don’t need no stinkin’ CDs. This is the digital age, baby, where one year a band can release a few songs on the World Wide Web and the next they’re in the pages of Rolling Stone.

Just about 12 months ago, Austin, Texas-based White Denim released the Let’s Talk About It EP on iTunes, and now they and their amped-up power pop seem to have nearly every rock critic by the short and curlies. NME, The New York Times, and GQ were a just a few of the publications wiping drool off their shirts while watching the three-piece perform during the 2007 and ’08 South By Southwest showcases, but the band’s fanbase has largely been built via the Internet, which the band shrewdly uses to distribute their music (making a lot of material available for free download through the online label/blog, Rcrd Lbl). With all this newfangled electronic mumbo jumbo, though, there is physical White Denim product available, but you’ll need a good-old fashioned turntable. The band have no intentions of releasing anything on CD. With digital sales up, CD sales (way) down, and vinyl collecting still a passion for many music lovers, White Denim’s blueprint of vinyl-and-high-quality-MP3-only releases could be the wave of the future.

“CDs seem pretty worthless to us,” bassist Steve Terebecki recently told Austin360.com. “Let’s just record something and release it as soon as it’s pressed,” drummer Josh Block told the Web site. “If someone happens to ask us about the record during a moment we know it’s coming out, that’s the press the record gets.”

White Denim open for Tapes ‘N Tapes.

– Trevor Fisher

Click here to visit Rcrd Lbl and download White Denim songs.

Category: Stage Buzz, Weekly