The real show-stopper is Billie Holiday, where the band take the central lyrical hook from Mary Wells’ Motown hit My Guy and thread it through an arrangement that borrows its haunting qualities from such similarly arresting efforts as Telepathe’s Can’t Stand It and Cat Power’s The Greatest. Elephants is brasher, but even at their most boisterous Warpaint respect control, underpinning bassline repetition keeping their aim straight and true. It’s gorgeous and simply constructed, its percussive pulse barely registering beneath lapping washes of beauteous melody. Opener Stars is all spectral, frail vocals and a guitar that echoes through the dark like a voice from an otherworldly dimension – its sound is somehow detached from the present, as if the preserved indentation of something more solid. It’s a magical brew, familiar yet wonderfully fresh to ears repeatedly beaten by noisy newcomers mistaking media attention for ability. Contrast is everything, and they perform these songs while exhibiting the sort of restraint-embracing sensibilities that will set them in good stead for an album proper in 2010. The band’s sound will appeal effortlessly to anyone swept up in the understated splendour of The xx’s silence-celebrating compositions – just like the young Londoners, Warpaint respect the balance between stirring (yet soothing) sounds and their surrounding stillness. But such is the impression left by one listen to Exquisite Corpse that it’s perfectly pitched: it’s an enticing taste, one that absolutely leaves the listener craving more.

Offering only six tracks, this introduction to Los Angeles quartet Warpaint is unlikely to initially represent value for money to many, given it retails at a price comparable to many full-length albums these days.

Warpaint exquisite corpse rar