I read that the band members of Wooden Shjips grew up on the East Coast, and it was a surprise when I saw them playing at Amoeba on Tuesday night, since they looked like they were embodying so well the San Francisco mythology, where the band is now based.
With their psychedelic-druggy-noisy songs, they were building these deep melodic grooves, using a repetitive bass-drum rhythm, a fuzzy guitar, and some buried-distant vocals, that could have put you into an hypnotic trance in a few minutes. It was a little bit strange since all the songs seemed to use that same psychedelic formula, but they were nevertheless quite different, reinventing the recipe each time, digging further, either faster or slower, loudly sprawling themselves like a deep smoky fog.
The music was static, and the songs had no progression but rather were repetitively stretching the time like an acid trip. It was pulsating, vibrating, like turning around on itself, but at the same time it was generating this toe-tapping among the people around me.
The guitar, played by frontman Ripley Johnson, was dancing and wandering around that drum-bass section, just like the hypnotic keyboard, which was amusingly recovered by some sort of aluminum foil, and was not without making some errand into The Doors’ territory. The indecipherable and monochord vocals were also reminiscent of Morrison’s, echoing from afar, dark and ghostly, giving a sort of mysterious incantation-feeling to their songs.
They talked very few words, thanked the crowd between the songs, and just said it was the first time they were playing live since December, to my surprise, as nothing would have let me guess this! The mysterious band is in fact a unique experiment as Johnson put together the band in 2003 with untrained musicians, just to see if they could play his spacey-psychedelia-krautrock-inspired music.
On Tuesday, they were playing at Amoeba to celebrate the release of their new record ‘West’, but these guys haven’t done anything like any other conventional band, avoiding myspace when it was its time, making their first material available only in vinyl, releasing numerous albums, singles and EPs via different labels, all in limited amounts, making them now very hard to find.
Their hallucinatory swirls have also drawn comparisons to The Velvet Underground’s experimentations, but these Wooden Shjips guys had this 70s-hippie look and attitude combined with a taste for some enigmatic experimentation, generating a sort of clash between the past and the future.