Fables of the Reconstruction: Woods

Woods are my favorite contemporary band for a lot of reasons, but the two biggest are their song writing chops and the weird sounds they weave throughout them. I don’t know enough about music to be sure exactly how they do it, but their tunes seem to reside in the major and minor keys simultaneously, if that’s even possible – they’re happy and sad all at the same time. And they’re infectious, highly hummable. As for the weird sounds, it all comes from the way they record: straight-up analogue. Inspired by records from the 60s and early 70s, the band has sought to recapture that sound by recording on the same old-school tape systems their idols did. Jarvis Taveniere, who along with Jeremy Earl forms the core of the group, said once in an interview, “when I began to develop my ear and have a more defined opinion on sound, I realized most of my favorite albums didn't sound expensive. I knew we couldn't play like The Byrds, but ‘Eight Miles High’ didn't seem sonically out of reach.” Woods go for those warm, cosmic sounds that creep into classic albums, like part on “I Wasn’t Born to Follow” from The Notorious Byrd Brothers (and the Easy Rider soundtrack) where the melody seems to get sucked into an oscillating jet engine, or the washed-out euphoria of “Shine a Light,” near the close of Exile on Main Street, or every second of Their Satanic Majesties Request. But they’re not a retro band. Despite the nods to the past, they’re a very current band. They’re like how music from the 60s would be if time had gone in reverse and punk had come first.

            They’re also Dead Heads, or at least Earl is, and for years I’ve been trying to get an old Dead Head friend of mine into them. At my urging, he checked out their 2010 release, At Echo Lake, and didn’t much like it; he thought the playing was subpar and the vocals were grating (“sloppy and hoarse,” is how he described them). It’s true, Earl has an unusual high-pitched voice, and it tends to polarize music fans: some love it, some cringe. And it’s true, too, that their musical skills have been evolving. Much as I love them, I rarely listen to their earliest records because, although they show some promise they’re not particularly well-executed. But with their last four records, starting with 2009’s Songs of Shame, they’ve steadily improved on all fronts: song writing, playing, recording technique, even singing. And with this year’s release, Bend Beyond, I think they’ve made a record that’ll ring nicely in my friend’s discriminating ears. The vocals are much smoother, and they’re nicely stacked in rich harmonies.     The songs are catchy and deceptively simple, masterfully played, but not slick—they’ve maintained their DIY edge. Indie music blogs are hailing it as their “most approachable gateway yet,” a cleaner presentation of their loose and lovable sound, and the band is forthright about the more deliberate approach they took in making it, spending more time crafting the songs in their home studios, moving away from the more spontaneous, devil-may-care policy that drove their earlier releases. A good comparison for this release is the records put out last year by Real Estate and Kurt Vile. Both artists had started in the low-fi quadrant of the underground music cosmos, and both had early releases on Earl’s label, Woodsist. Their 2011 releases were their first pro studio albums on big labels. Among the two, I’d place Bend Beyond nearer to the Kurt Vile end of the spectrum. It’s cleaner, yes, and more professional, but their sound has lost little if any of their weirdness and uniqueness, and I have to admit I can’t say the same about Real Estate’s Days, which was a bit too polished. What lifts Woods’ new record above the ones by their friends is that they did it themselves. Near as I can tell, they aim to keep doing so, and I believe they’ll keep getting better and better.

Fables of the Reconstruction: Krautrock and Its Descendants Pt. I

There’s a scene in Portlandia where a mom stands up at a PTA meeting in the library of a fancy pre-school and demands better music in the school’s record collection. The discussion gets heated, and the school principal admits that she doesn’t know what Krautrock is. The mom fills with rage and says, “I am getting very stressed out that the head of our school does not know about NEU! These are the people teaching our kids!” The skit hit close to home. I was a college professor before I’d heard of them. I somehow missed out on Krautrock completely, despite a lifelong love of freaky music.

My introduction to NEU! was their first album, NEU!, which I picked up with a whole bunch of other Krautrock classics. It’s a very wide-ranging genre—from the guitar-heavy darkness of Amon Duul to the quiet, icy space sounds of Edgar Froese and Cluster and Tangerine Dream to the computer weirdness of Kraftwerk to the drum-centered jams of Can and NEU!. I wanted to check it out because a lot of the new bands I’m into—Woods, Wet Hair, Herbcraft—are admitted Krautrock freaks. You can really hear the connection in NEU!’s self-titled debut. It came out in 1972 and it’s mostly instrumentals that center on simple but infectious grooves, driving beats that serve as a solid core for cosmic improvisation. As the numbers progress, the guitarists keep adding variations to a central theme, distorting it with space-age swells of feedback and distortion, adding extra beats here and there to quicken the pace, or subtracting to slow it down. It’s like a far-out geometric pattern, like that part at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, where Dave the astronaut goes through the wormhole.

As I listened, I came to realize that I’d enjoyed this sound already. It’s obvious to me, for example, that Krautrock has had a strong influence on Phish and the way they approach psychedelic improvisation. It’s not sprawling improv like the Grateful Dead or Miles Davis of the late 60s and early 70s; it’s more contained, like a mandala or a kaleidoscope, but it suggests infinity just as ably as music that seems to spread out through space. And a couple of the songs sound a lot like numbers on recent Woods and Jovontaes records. First track on NEU!, “Hallogallo” has chicka-chocka rhythm guitar riff running through it that’s reminiscent of “Out of the Eye,” a long instrumental on Woods’ Sun and Shade, my favorite album from last year. And the last song on side one, “Weisseusee,” a wonderfully slow and spacy tune, is almost a dead ringer for a long track on Jovontaes’ debut LP, Things Are Different Here.

The Jovontaes’ record was my favorite sleeper release from last year. They’re a band of young skate freaks from Lexington, Kentucky, and they had previously only released a few sloppy sounding cassettes that offered no indication of what they had up their sleeves for their jump up to vinyl. The record is entirely instrumental and it’s very chill and smoky; I like to play it when my wife and I have another couple over and we open up a second bottle of wine and settle in for a long night of conversation and spacing out. It unfolds nicely in the background, but it’s not background music; though relatively quiet and slow, it’s got enough freaky sounds to keep it interesting and compelling for those moments when the conversation dies down and the mind yearns for something to focus on.

Woods’ latest release, a split LP with Amps for Christ, has a more wide-ranging sound, with strands of 60s pop and raga and noise woven through it, but their side closes with a long instrumental called “September Saturn” that’s got a real Krautrock feel. A simple four-beat bass line lays the foundation, and it stays steady throughout as threads of strange sounds are added to it, first some shaky tambourine and symbol, then a few layers of guitar, some fuzzed out, others bright and clear. All together, it forms a kind of aural environment, like some crazy jungle on a Star Trek planet, and it keeps getting stranger and more interesting the more sounds are added in. The Amps for Christ side is interesting, too, rooted more in the noise tradition, but it’s rarely abrasive or grating, and it has a lovely traditional-style song in the middle. But for me, the Woods side is the real reason for picking up this release. They just keep getting better and better, and the fact that this split was a little side project, that the songs here are ones that didn’t make it on the LP they’ll be releasing this fall, indicates to me that they gearing up for a big breakthrough release. And for the sake of our children, I hope that the Shooting Star pre-school on Portlandia picks up a copy for their library collection.

Fables of the Reconstruction: Best of 2011

The official selection process for my year’s best list began a week before Christmas when my wife Allie took off for a weekend trip with a friend and I had the whole house to myself. I took all my 2011 records off the shelf, leaned them against my stereo cabinet in two neat piles, and proceeded to pair them off in sudden-death match-ups, the volume cranked high. The competition began with a fury as I sipped my coffee on Saturday morning: White Fence’s Is Growing Faith vs. Peaking Lights’ 936. White Fence won easily and advanced past Spectre Folk’s The Blackest Medicine, Vol. II before falling in the third round to Ducktails’ III: Arcade Dynamics, whose victory was so decisive it left no doubt that this stony collection of ultra-echofied tunes by Real Estate’s lead guitarist would wind up in the top ten. By noon I had a bracket going and was tweeting all the action to my 23 loyal followers.

The tournament was more or less rigged. I knew going in what my final four would be, so I went through an entire legal pad trying to figure out a defensible way for these favorite records to make it to the semifinals. By sundown I was blissing out to a mismatch between Herbcraft’s Ashram to the Stars and Phish’s The White Tape when I began to see how absurd the whole venture was. I remembered what a famous guitarist once said as he was accepting a “best of the year” award, that music isn’t completion, and I felt a wave of guilt for imposing such capitalistic cutthroat-ness on egalitarian beauty. Plus so much of the music that came into my life this year is utterly incommensurable. Like that first match up. How can anyone honestly compare the highly distorted 60s pop revival of White Fence to the syncopated spaciness of Peaking Lights? It’s like turnips and pomegranates. It was fun to spend a day shuffling and sorting and celebrating all these wonderful new objects, trying to figure out how they defined this year in my life, but by bedtime I was fully repentant. I tweeted, “The brackets aren't a good idea. Tomorrow I'll swap ‘versus’ for ‘and’.”

The next day was one of creative coupling: Wet Hair’s über weird super synth freak out with Mississippi Records’ reissue of Fanfody, a collection of field recordings from Madagascar; the Record Store Day re-release of Country Joe and the Fish’s acid-rock masterpiece Electric Music for the Mind and Body with The Polyps’ Ants on the Golden Cone and its ambient clouds of feedback that billow and contort and dissipate to reveal the most lovely and quiet folk melodies; the savory international fusion flavor Julian Lynch’s Terra next to the widely acclaimed second LP by his good friends in Real Estate next to the no-nonsense pop rock of the Feelies, to whom Real Estate is often compared; Kurt Vile’s 7” next tohis 12” EP next to his LP.

By the time Allie returned I still had dozens of new releases to listen to, including two big contenders for Numero Uno that I wouldn’t for play for nearly two weeks because it was too painful to do so. A few days before my year’s best selection process began, our dog Maddie died after a long battle with cancer. Maddie had been the most consistent source of joy in our lives, and during the final stages of her illness we’d developed a daily ritual of “pack nights” where we’d dim the lights in our living room, cozy up and listen the best new psychedelic rock. Allie requested a moratorium on any sounds that called those evenings to mind, so we nursed our wounds with a binge of Delta blues and kept Woods’ Sun and Shade and Matt Valentine’s What I Became at bay because they were just too vivid of reminders of what we had just lost. Especially the Woods record. We’d listened to it over and over throughout the summer as tumors spread across Maddie’s body.

Then, on the last Friday of the year, my wife asked if we could hear the Grateful Dead’s Europe 72 Vol. 2, which she hadn’t been able to listen to since the night Maddie died, when we sat together and cried to its stunning version of “Sing Me Back Home.” It doesn’t get much more psychedelic than that, with its rare pairing of “Dark Star” and “The Other One” that sprawls across three sides of virgin 180 gram vinyl. And you don’t think music can ever get any better, but then Jerry Garcia slows it down and conjures all the beautiful sadness of life and death with an old Merle Haggard song, “Sing Me Back Home.” I looked over at Allie and she appeared to be contented, so I decided to push the envelope and put on Sun and Shade. At some point during side one, probably when Jeremy Earl sings, “Oh what falls apart and what won’t come back, lay it loose, let it love like that,” I realized that I had been listening to this album at the precise moment when I came to terms with the fact that Maddie would not only die but would die very soon. Allie had gone out with some friends so it was just me and the dogs. I petted Maddie during the first track, “Pushing Onlys,” and I found a half dozen new tumors and I just started bawling and I kept bawling and petting Maddie all the way through. With it playing again now, and with our pack down to three, I turned to Allie and I told her about this moment and the tears came again. I cried hard, so hard that my whole body tensed up and I had to gasp for breath, but when it was over I told Allie it felt good. And that was when I knew what was the best album of 2011.

My top ten:

10. Jovontaes Things Are Different Here

9. The Polyps Ants on the Golden Cone

8. Ryan Garbes Sweet Hassle

7. MV + EE Country Stash

6. TIE Ducktails III: Arcade Dynamics | Real Estate Days

5. TIE Grateful Dead Europe 72 vol 2 | Conrad Schnitzler Live 1972

4. Wet Hair In Vogue Spirit

3. Kurt Vile Smoke Ring for My Halo

2. Matt Valentine What I Became

1. Woods Sun and Shade

Fables of the Reconstruction: Woods

One of the best things about record collecting is the whole discovery aspect, the way you can venture off in any direction into music and find the most amazing things, which lead to more amazing things, and even more, and so on. And sometimes you come across something so big you have to actually step back and try to figure out how it’s going to fit into your life. Because it’s more than, say, a half dozen albums and a concert DVD. It’s years and years of music on vinyl and CD and CDR and cassette and video and sometimes even books, and a lot of it is hard to find and quite expensive, but you have to have every last note.

A couple years ago I made a simple little iTunes purchase that started me down the path to the mother lode. I was on the hunt for new music, reading Pitchfork everyday, when I came across a good review of an album by a Brooklyn band called Woods. I listened to the whole album, Songs of Shame, for free on some Internet start-up that’s now defunct, and I liked its blend of ramshackle garage sound with psychedelic guitar sounds, peculiar vocal harmonies and solid songwriting, so I tossed another ten bucks Steve Jobs’s way. I’d play to it on my iPod when I’d go running, or sometimes on my computer while I worked, but I wouldn’t have called it a favorite or a main staple. But then, after I bought my turntable and started collecting records again, I came across a used copy of it on LP in the new arrivals bin at Love Garden in Lawrence, Kansas. When the clerk rang me up he told me their most recent release, At Echo Lake, was even better, but it was early in my new record-collecting adventure and I wasn’t very adventurous yet.

That all changed when I listened to it on vinyl, of course. It was like I’d never heard it before, rich with complexities that hadn’t revealed themselves to me through my puny ear buds or $50 computer speakers. I went right back to the record store and got At Echo Lake, and the clerk was right – sturdy songs with fetching pop melodies adorned with trippy distortion/noise and bent and twisted notes weaving throughout. I couldn’t get enough so I went online to learn more about them, and I found that they had a new record coming out, and, for the first time since college, I started counting the days to an album release date. I bought Sun and Shade directly from the label before it showed up in stores, and when I put it on the turntable I realized I had found an incredible band early enough in their career that I could actually listen to them grow – explore new sounds, tweak old sounds and mature. Sun and Shade is a lot like Woods’ earlier records, ten songs with melodies so catchy I find myself humming them when I’m in a bad mood and a couple of long instrumental jams that are chock full of weirdness. But there’s a mastery here that wasn’t as fully developed on Songs of Shame and At Echo Lake. The vocals are smoother, a little less high pitch and off center, and they’re richly layered with lovely harmonies. One of the alt music blogs I read regularly said that a lot of the songs would’ve sounded right at home on stage at Woodstock, and I agree: they’re bright with sunshine and flowers even when the lyrics are sad and lead man Jeremy Earl’s voice is full of emotion; but they’re also unmistakably new, full of curlicues of distortion and twisted tones that take into account every rock and roll revolution since Sgt. Pepper’s.

Woods - Pushing Onlys by Revolver USA
 

So I loved it, and now I’m hooked, which is fun but not easy. Woods has been making music since 2006, but all of their early stuff was released on short runs of a few hundred copies and it’s all out of print. I managed to find a few things at the record store, most notably a one-sided 12” of live acoustic versions of a few tunes from Songs of Shame with photo-copied art glued to a blank white album sleeve. But most is only available online, where the shipping charges are steep, and some of it you have to really flex your Google muscles to find - like their first release, a split 12” inch they released with the now defunct Raccoo-oo-oon. It’s a true “got to have it” artifact with a hand silk-screened cover and a real rabbit foot attached. I searched for hours and days and finally found one – literally ­one – listed on Woodsist’s site for $40. But by the time I was ready to place an order a week later, the listing was gone. So I emailed the label and got a reply from Earl himself saying he might have one but I’d have to wait until he got back from his summer tour before I could get it, which is pretty cool in and of itself.

Earl has his own record label, Woodsist, and my love of Woods led me to explore their catalogue and listen to samples of the bands on Myspace and found an entire world of psychedelic music ranging from highly structured stuff like Woods to completely out there improvisational sounds like Herbcraft, who I wrote about here recently. And when I say “world,” I mean it. Pretty much all of the bands on the Woodsist label had released albums for other small labels such as Not Not Fun, Mexican Summer and Thrill Jockey. And they all comprised a nationwide community, a burgeoning subculture of artists – Real Estate, Ducktails, Sun Araw, Raccoo-oo-oon, MV + EE and a bunch more I’d never heard of – who walk on the far-out side and who have been releasing music for years on LP, 12” EP, 7” and cassette in short run, like the rabbit foot record. Suddenly I had a lot of things to collect. Hundreds and thousands of dollars worth. More than that, my hobby had a new imperative, and I felt like I was part of something wonderful and amazing that few other people knew about, and that’s an awesome feeling.