I’m standing on the top of a building leaning out slightly as the wind buffets me. I can taste fumes. My right heel stamps down hard to the beat as my upper body twitches to the offbeat. In front of me faraway lights sparkle, fade, mesh rapidly together in lines then part, now blazing, now dying; hurting me good.
I have no idea where, or why and I’m way past how by this point in the evening. That beat holds me, fixes me far more than the wind does; my only certainty. On the horizon I can see the black smoke rise in the darkness, despite the darkness, because of the darkness. My heel stamping, still.
Which is a round about way of describing how much I like ‘Black Smoke Rise’ the opening and best track of Wooden Shjips West, from 2011 when optimism still stalked the world and the Western states of the US did not actually look like the colourised photograph on the back of the LP cover during fire season. True story.
I came to San-Fran sci-fried psych merchants Wooden Shjips via various ecstatic reviews and their frantic second LP Dos. West really was and is something else though.
The band kicked on (and back) from their early DIY, fly-in-a-jar, break-on-through-to-the-other-side, buzzy psych and with the assistance of Phil Manley at the controls, plus a spot-on mastering job from the legend that is Sonic Boom, relaxed and hit the sweet spot with West.
The band stretched out and relaxed audibly into the groove here. Everything feels organic and alive on West, the beautiful cool of a rural sunset. The band’s follow-up LP may be called Back To Land but this album’s sound is far more Walden Pond than Golden Gate.
Everything the Shjips do is still built entirely around their version of the motorik beat, Ripley Johnson’s guitar shimmering through the mix and his eerily detached voice reporting back like a burnt out war reporter filing occasional despatches from the herbal frontline*.
Much like Crazy Horse Wooden Shjips have a gloriously unfussy rhythm section of Dusty Jermier on bass and Omar Ahsanuddin on drums. They just lock into each groove perfectly, allowing everything else to happen around them, which is particularly apparent live. On the expansive ‘Flight’ the effect is epic and trance-inducing as Nash Whalen’s keys sparkle somewhere high up in the mix.
Speaking of Mr Young’s backing band the gnarly, inevitable sounding ‘Home’ is pure primo ‘Horse. Every chord change flagged up miles ahead and a melodic arc that sounds not so much jammed out as actually predestined. I love it.
Not that there aren’t variations on West, there is the backwards recorded ‘Rising’ which provides a suitably tripped-out endpoint for the album and the rockabilly-paced ‘Lazy Bones’ which I’m less keen on, because of the feeble drum sound, not because of my own tortoise tendencies.
But if you’re looking to join up and shjip out on the psych train** then my advice is to hit up ‘Crossing’. Ripley’s guitar tone is mean and expansive, his voice just a whiteout drawl. Tiny chord changes assume monumental proportions in the mix. It only lasts 5:12 but every time I play it I seem to spend hours wandering around inside it.
Heady shjit man.
1130 Down.
PS: Because I love you, more than I can ever tell you:
PPS: I forgot to mention/couldn’t find a way to shoehorn it into the above, it isn’t an original thought but I think Ripley’s playing owes a lot to John Cippolina.
*as an aside, I have listened to this LP a glugzillion times in the last 9 years and I couldn’t tell you a single lyric he sings on West, at best maybe a three word phrase here, or there.
**and I suggest you do.
