Wooden Shjips effortlessly transports The Corner Hotel’s eager crowd to a wicked wasteland of gurgling guitars and creeping rhythms. Their 2011 album, West, is a sprawling and visceral assault of forbidding psychedelic drone and entrancing minimalist rhythms. Tonight, they offer an experience that feels more like a spiritual journey than just your typical evening of mind-melting rock’n’roll.
Beaches seem a little lost in reverb, tonight. The elegance of their fuzzy compositions is battered brutally by unrelenting distortion. Walls of pulverizing fuzz are part of the band’s sound, but tonight, it’s too much. The most notable casualty is the vocals, which are rendered almost redundant amongst the hazy mix. However, the girls otherwise appear to be on form, with a collective smile splashing its way across their faces and the crowd offering a keen ear. Their drawling shoegaze concoctions offer a deliriously hypnotic entrée for the pending blaze of our Wooden Shjips feast.
Wooden Shjips’ set is like getting lost on an unknown highway in the middle of the night. You don’t know where you’re going, everything’s starting to look the same and you have this horrible fear that if you stop, something bad is going to happen. Bathed entirely in red light and swamped in smoke, kaleidoscopic projections dance across the band and embed themselves on the walls behind. While the band offers little in the way of entertaining antics or banter, bassist Dusty Jermier’s clear passion for the music is oddly beautiful to behold, as he closes his eyes and sways gently to the mesmerizing basslines, and guitarist/vocalist, Ripley Johnson, has a strangely captivating intensity from which our eyes are reluctant to stray.
There’s very little variety in the set, but their overwhelming power is adequate compensation. It wouldn’t be too far-fetched to expect your hair to get swept up in an attack of vibrations, or for your heartbeat to synchronise with the rhythm section. At times, the basslines are exasperatingly repetitive and simple, but it’s the hypnotic, meditative power of these basslines that hold this band’s mind-melting psychedelic assaults together. It would take a lot of will power not to get swept up in these motorik rhythms, and avoid being absorbed by the miasma of swirling guitars.
The guitar solos are moody and aggressive, while the drums pound with a feverish urgency. It’s all a bit messy, though. Good luck trying to decipher lyrics, since the vocals are so thoroughly drenched in effects that they’re barely distinguishable from the tangled web of guitar sounds that surrounds them. Even attempting to determine the general flow of the melody becomes a fruitless endeavour.
Each song is almost drearily similar, but not to the extent that it ever actually becomes tiresome. It’s the nature of their sound to be simultaneously stimulating and relaxing. You might find yourself drifting into a peaceful half-state, while your mind may suddenly ignite, burning down the doors that usually inhibit your spiritual journeys.
However, it would be easy to get bored with this. Each track sounds pretty much the same as the last, and it doesn’t necessarily improve as the set progresses, but it would be naïve to expect anything from Wooden Shjips other than droning psychedelic rock. The problem is that there is no point of elevation during the set. Perhaps it’s greedy of us to expect a climactic conclusion, but there’s nothing that’s going to stick in our memories forever. The overall power of their set will have us talking for a few days, but it’s likely to fade into the muddled mess at the backs of our minds. Of course, that’s part of the charm of the humble Wooden Shjips. There’s not trickery. Swirling kaleidoscopic projections aside (which genuinely feel like an extension of the music itself), there’s nothing to detract from the innately awesome power of their buzzing psychedelic rock.
– Lara Moates
