Being a firmly Californian band, San Francisco's Wooden Shjips embody everything about the mythical "West" and west coast. Infusing their music with psychedelia, jazz, garage rock and Cosmic American Music, Ripley Johnson's band of travellers haven't always been easy listening. Bowing before the altar of the groove, the eponymous debut and then Dos were jammy, headcrushing epics, marrying balls-out Stooges rock with spacey Hawkwind segments, culminating in the likes of the 11-minute 'Down By the Sea' from that second record.
Third album West - the first recorded in a proper studio space - comes hot on the heels of Johnson's record as Moon Duo, and finds the band in a more compact and accessible frame of mind. It'd be a stretch to call West pop or commercial, but it does find the band in a slightly different frame of mind, yet still exploring the outer limits of rock music.
Opener 'Black Smoke Rise' begins by kicking out the jams MC5 style, with the fuzzy guitars married to a wonderful organ drone. What Johnson seems to do is to find that one effects pedal and stamp on it til he decides it's time to end the song. Next track 'Crossing' is a martial and hypnotic track, almost brought to a crashing end by a crackling and echoey Crazy Horse solo, adding a further feeling of dread to the track, which already touches on inescapable death.
Third album West - the first recorded in a proper studio space - comes hot on the heels of Johnson's record as Moon Duo, and finds the band in a more compact and accessible frame of mind. It'd be a stretch to call West pop or commercial, but it does find the band in a slightly different frame of mind, yet still exploring the outer limits of rock music.
Opener 'Black Smoke Rise' begins by kicking out the jams MC5 style, with the fuzzy guitars married to a wonderful organ drone. What Johnson seems to do is to find that one effects pedal and stamp on it til he decides it's time to end the song. Next track 'Crossing' is a martial and hypnotic track, almost brought to a crashing end by a crackling and echoey Crazy Horse solo, adding a further feeling of dread to the track, which already touches on inescapable death.
The more compact side of Wooden Shjips is shown on the 3-minute boogie of 'Lazy Bones', it being a track that wouldn't be out of place on The Doors' LA Woman. This is further added to by the straight-ahead rock and roll of 'Home'. It's the track that most reflects Johnson's statement that the record might be influenced by Neil Young and Crazy Horse, and it very much sounds like a lost track from Rust Never Sleeps (the band of course covered 'Vampire Blues' on Vol.2) or a cut from Dirty-era Sonic Youth.
'Flight' coats metallic riffs in organ swirls for 5 minutes, and 'Looking Out' verges on Nuggets pastiche, but ends up being great ramalama fun. Closing track 'Rising' is recorded entirely backwards, and in hands other than Wooden Shjips' it might sound preposterous but within the context of the album it works completely.
West continues the Wooden Shjips journey along the coast of California, and if you're looking for an entry into their psych space-rock world, you'll not find a better place to start.
Below is album opener 'Black Smoke Rise':
Wooden Shjips: "Black Smoke Rise" by alteredzones
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