Wooden Shjips...West(2011)[FLAC]

West [2011]Thrill Jockey / Thrill 279


1. Black Smoke Rise (4:10)
2. Crossing (5:13)
3. Lazy Bones (3:54)
4. Home (6:05)
5. Fight (7:08)
6. Looking Out (5:57)
7. Rising (5:09)

How important is the idea of the song to Wooden Shjips? Not at all, judging from the last track on their third album. Initially, it seems Rising is just more fuzzed guitars and narcotised vocals. Then it becomes apparent the percussion is backward: neat trick. Oh, and the voice is backward. In fact, Rising appears to be a whole song with the tape played in reverse: and so single-minded is Wooden Shjips' conception of their music that it's almost indistinguishable from the songs where the tape was allowed to run the right way. Nevertheless, there's a pleasing vigour to these psychedelic journeys: Lazy Bones and Looking Out marry the propulsion of garage-band R&B to trebly, brittle, acid-fried psychedelic guitar, and Ripley Johnson's lead lines are unfailingly inventive, making the songs take flight. It's the unrelenting power of the two-chord drones, though, that is the real draw here, bass and drums throbbing hard enough to add a real heartbeat to songs that might otherwise seem insubstantial enough to melt away. It's enervating, sunbaked and, for all that, rather thrilling.


cd ripped by EAC

please seed

http://dickthespic.org/2011/09/24/wooden-shjips/