So, what’s all the fuss about the impossible-to-find early material by Californian quartet Wooden Shjips? That’s the question which Volume 1 aims to answer, compiling the music from the band’s three first releases, the first of which was free, the other two of which were very very limited runs (and now probably worth a fortune as a result).
And what do Wooden Shjips sound like? OK, imagine you’re sat somewhere in the California valleys in the very late sixties, a few hours after chewing vigorously on three spansules of Owsley’s Old Original. You’re in what might be a large tent, or possibly a little back-room bar full of smoke; the rest of the patrons are an odd mix of the Hair Bear Bunch, some whacked-out flower children and Hunter S Thompson’s one-time biker buddies. There’s a garage rock’n'roll band with an organ on stage, but they appear to be at right angles to the reality you currently inhabit, and time for them occasionally runs backwards. Or maybe that’s just you.
Volume 1 is about as psychedelic as it gets, then. Wooden Shjips go the distance, deep into the weird where most ‘trippy’ bands don’t dare to go; at the extreme end, “Space Clothes” is just a series of electronic drones with swathes of backwards-masked spoken word over the top of it which - as a piece of music in the sense that most people understand the word – makes no sense at all. It’s a celebration of sound, wilfully experimental and stripped back beyond the essentials.
Volume 1 does feature some tracks that are closer to being regular rock songs, but that’s strictly a relative statement when talking about Wooden Shjips. Opener “Shrinking Moon” sounds like eight and a half minutes spent in an alternate universe where The Warlocks learned to write cheery riffs and then mangle them with mad effects and volume, while eleven minute epic “SOL ‘07” has a madcap off-kilter pop vibe to it that makes you want to sit by the sea, paint your face daft colours, strip down to a sarong and do that fingers-over-the-eyes dance that Travolta and Thurman did in Pulp Fiction. “Dance, California”, on the other hand, is what you might have got had Dave Wyndorf of Monster Magnet decided to stick with the Tab … 25 template instead of booking a flight for Planet Rock.
Wooden Shjips are not for everyone. That’s not an elitist statement, but an observation of fact. Volume 1 is just too fuzzy, anarchic and crazed to appeal to most folk, the extremely lo-fi production values will put off the MTV kids, and as for making sense – well, I’m not sure it even makes sense to the band themselves, but the particular style of hypnotic non-sense Wooden Shjips produce will probably only resonate with those who have taken the occasional (or not so occasional) chemically-assisted journey across the barriers of consciousness.
It’s a voyage of discovery, you dig? And if Wooden Shjips are what the uber-hip tastemakers are praising now, we’ll be hearing a lot more of this sound over the next year or two. So grab a copy of Volume 1 and pretend you caught wind of them right at the start.
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Posted in Music reviews |
Tags: garage, psychedelic, rock, rock'n'roll, Volume 1, weird, Wooden Shjips
