I went to see Woods back in July of this year at the Whitney and I had this to stay: “Woods start their set with “Rain On” and “Too Clean” with the lead singer on acoustic guitar and his gorgeous falsetto leading me to believe they are a folk band but they are just starting and half way through their forty five minute set the guy is high high up on the neck of his guitar and shredding notes. Later still he is playing a blues shuffle first in the spaces left by and then along with the DJ.”
Now some four months later I am browsing on daytrotter and find a handful of Woods song newly recorded in the daytrotter.com studio. They are much, much more of a pop band, no jamming, just strongly controlled folk-pop plus vibes, and they sound just as good.
The truth is everything sounds better with daytrotter.com. I don’t know who the producers are but they have perfected a perfect way to produce a band. It is like they remove all the clutter of the world and force the performers to deal with the immediacy of their songs. It is not recorded live, there is overdubbing, but it sounds live and if you don’t like the band you won’t like them here because the producers won’t let them hide. This is what the band sounds like at the time they were recorded. The producers work in analogue and only at the end of the process switch to digital which must be one reason the sound is so warm.
I would pay cash money to hear em strip the layers of gook off A Springsteen or a U2 but I wil absolutely settle for something as perfect as the new Colin Hay is incredibly enough the leader of the eighties band aussie band Men At Work but listening to him now it is almost unbelievable he was the guy behind “Who can It Be Now?”. “Oh California” is a perfert guitar ballad and the guys get of its way and let the song breathe.
I stalk em at least once a week and recently came across one of my biggest songs of the moment: Of Montreals’ “Requiem for Omm 2”. But search around. Dirty Projectors? Check (and real good as well). Aimee Mann: less good. Death Cab For Cutie: cuts their “Equinox” song. Ani DiFranco…. the least is really really wrong.
And it’s free.
I know I keep on writing about daytrotter.com but it is really, really, really that good.