WHIRLWIND HEAT
Rising from the swampy depths of Grand Rapids, Michigan in the halcyon days of the mid-Nineties, what began as a quartet of Moog-toting, Sonic Youth-obsessed spazzes evolved quickly before our eyes. A performance at the Gold Dollar in Detroit led to recording a 7” for Italy Records and a song for inclusion on the Sympathetic Sounds of Detroit compilation. Pared down to a trio shortly thereafter, the Heat (as they would affectionately be truncated to by their friends and enemies alike) would become the first outside band on Jack White’s Third Man Records with the 2003 release of the colorfully-song-titled album Do Rabbits Wonder? Worldwide touring ensued, frenzy was created, fervor was whipped-up and nothing short of fantastic was the trip. The ten-songs-in-ten-minutes follow-up Flamingo Honey was written and recorded in a single day and is still, in this writer’s opinion, one of the stand-out accomplishments of Western culture in the mid-2000’s. A second “proper-length” disc entitled Types of Wood was recorded in California in hopes of recreating the Cake Fashion Nugget drum sound. Promo copies of the album were accompanied by custom-made Louisville Sluggers with the album info burned into the sweet spot of the baseball bat. The fact that mailing a baseball bat has long been considered a postal way to preface a beating of the recipient was apparently lost on members of the press. While members are all currently spread far away from the GRAP environs of their upbringing and located in such cosmopolitan locales as Los Angeles, Chicago and New York City did not prevent them from recording and kind-of releasing their most recent album Scoop Du Jour. The Whirlwind Heat are pretty much the older brothers here at Third Man. They give us noogies and call dibs on chocolate chip cookies straight out of the oven, but they’ve been around the longest, so they’re entitled to at least that.
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