Live onstage during the fifth and final night of the Tomorrow Never Knows festival at Schuba’s, Austin-originated three-piece White Denim lurched through their scorchingly thrilling set with a curious, sideways-crawling, crablike momentum. Much like comedian Eddie Izzard reveals the inner workings of stand-up with between-bit meta-mumblings of “uh…buh-buh-bah-buh…um…” until he goes off on another blindingly brilliant tear, so too does the band punctuate the moments of post-applause dead air with a series of half-private half-conversations among themselves that amount to little more, content-wise, than “that one? Wait, I’m not ready; OK, now I’m ready.” It’s all utterly charming, a charm that’s only compounded by their knife-like and snotty late-70s New York sound. One would almost certainly never reverse-engineer their goofy stage presence from the overall sonic vibe of their blistering and propulsive EP Let’s Talk About It, nor would a person necessarily expect this throwbacky yet somehow totally unique sound to erupt from the quietly silly chaos that pools around the feet of the band members like a mess of wind-up chattering teeth and cymbal-clanging monkeys.

It’s tempting to pessimistically wonder how long they can sustain this playful amateurishness before it starts to seem shticky or cloying, but to what end would we indulge in such fatalism? White Denim are here now, and they’ve got those beautiful, almost shocked looks on their faces, virtually exclusive to young bands on the verge of really breaking out, that read, exuberantly, as, “Holy shit! We’re really fucking good!” That kind of joy is louder than any mumble, more urgent than any floor-tom beat-down, more impossible to deny than any collateral web-hype. They self-deprecatingly joked after the eruption of hoots and cheers that greeted the last notes of “Mess Your Hair Up,” “that’s the showstopper; we play that one in the middle now,” and it couldn’t have been a more accurate description of a band burning through a limited, but insanely promising repertoire so they can leave room for all the excitement yet to come.

Brooklyn-based multi-piece White Rabbits, carting two drum kits and a boatload of lately fashionable sweater-vest charm around the country, found themselves in the unenviable position of playing for a packed house savagely salivating with anticipation of a rare Sunday-night small club set from the Walkmen. Their rabbit moniker was probably never more appropriate, as they seemed squarely in the crosshairs of a horde confident in its role as collective executioner. We had the gun, and they knew it.

Perhaps in a gesture of self-defense, their bass levels were cranked past 11 to “missile installation.” Much of their shambling appeal was unfortunately sacrificed to this, and, while their songs are purposely and demonstrably built to mount a big swell to a triumphant climax, all that bass didn’t afford them the necessary amount of space needed to peak properly. The percussion breakdown in “Sea of Rum,” for example, should have rattled like a fistful of magic beans tossed lightly inside a coconut shell, but instead merely rattled, thunderously, like a jar of ball bearings spilled in the cavernous trunk of an old Buick.

Under more auspicious circumstances, they would have been the perfect amuse-bouche for the Walkmen, what with their shared affinity for some serious butt in the bass and drums, the intoxicated ramblings of the piano and jangly guitar, and intriguingly reedy lead vocals. Their songs are pleasantly melodic, if occasionally too expansive — by no means an irredeemable fault. However, looking a bit tired that night and perhaps cowed by their virtually no-win position on the bill, one can hardly blame them for attempting to translate their affable fluffiness into something a bit more vicious.

Which brings us to the Walkmen. Where, in the band’s early years, their sound was like a water balloon hurled at the back wall of a venue, explosive and brightly colored and just the slightest bit juvenile, now, all this time after their debut with Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me Is Gone and implicitly including the additional time spent paying dues in Jonathan Fire*Eater and the Recoys, the water balloon has been transformed into the steady, full-bodied rush of a masterfully wielded firehose. Simply put, they are playing unbelievably well these days.

They carved up “Little House of Savages” with all the elegant brutality of a really well-made mob movie, and debuted a host of new songs liberally seasoned with their signature drunken lamentation without ever descending into self-parody. One also can’t help feeling proud of their restraint when they deliberately don’t play, or even encore with, “The Rat.” Rather than coming off as willfully perverse or even an intentional slap in the face to the fair-weather fans who still, stubbornly, insist that song, for all its exceptional qualities, is the uncontested, incontrovertible pinnacle of their recorded output, its omission plays more into their newly mellow, but by no means toothless, bearing as been-there, done-that scenester sophisticates. I mean this in a good way: it’s the secure shrug of a group of men confident in their power, unflappable in their self-possession, but still raw enough underneath it all to summon the fierce force needed to turn that firehose back on in the first place.

White Rabbits Daytrotter Session
The Walkmen Bookery Reading
White Denim