When you’re reading about San Francisco space-rockers Wooden Shjips, certain other bands’ names come up over and over again: the Stooges, Suicide, Hawkwind, Spacemen 3. On a certain level, that’s inevitable. There’s nothing new about what Wooden Shjips do, and we can hear the quotation marks in the band’s music even if they didn’t intend to put them there. All the bands named above, in one way or another, made visceral, forbidding rock that drew much of its power through stretching-to-infinity repetition. When I hear it, another name springs to mind: Lungfish, if the great Baltimore astral-punk band had made music for the Camaro-cruising goons in Dazed and Confused (and if they’d had a way less distinctive singer, but that’s another story). Wooden Shjips turn the crunchy choogle of 1970s boogie-rock into isolation-chamber space-out fare. When it connects, that’s a powerful formula, though it’s still a formula.
For a band that thrives on eternal repetition, Wooden Shjips have made some impressive strides toward approachability from album to album, and West is by far their biggest leap yet. On previous records, the band would be content to ride a single chord long enough to turn your brain into goo. But the tracks on West are comparatively compact (the longest top out around seven minutes), and they often come equipped with riffs and melodies that don’t sound too terribly far-removed from classic-rock radio fare. The recording itself is warmer and cleaner than anything they’ve done. Most of the songs blast off into glorious solos near the end. I’m pretty sure I heard a tambourine on at least one song. In short, it’s the first Wooden Shjips record that your stoner uncle might not hate.
Still, the band is very much doing what it does on West. Even with its increased focus on classic-rock virtues, the album isn’t really a collection of riffs and wails and choruses; it’s more a muscular sort of vibe-out– badass ambient music, if you will. As hard as the band can rock, expansive nod-out music is still its focus, and the album works best when you give yourself over entirely to its pounding grandeur. Frontman Ripley Johnson sings in a narcoleptic mutter that never displays the slightest bit of feeling, and his numbed monotone never disturbs the mood by leaping out of the mix to grab you. The band deserves credit for sticking to the simple purity of its own sound, but its music seems unlikely to cause the sort of life-changing epiphanies sometimes created by those bands I listed in the first paragraph.
In a perfect world, the album might end with “Flight”, its best and longest track, a deep fuzzed-out groove with a nagging organ line that builds to a cathartic guitar-solo flare-up. It’s the track that most perfectly exemplifies the band’s sound, and it works well enough to leave you dazed by the time it’s over. But the album keeps going for two more songs– the relatively sprightly “Looking Out” and the vaguely puzzling “Rising”. Now, I’m not sure if all of “Rising” is played backward or if it’s just the vocals and the drums. I’m guessing it’s probably the whole thing. It’s like the band challenged itself, not by varying its usual zone-out style but by seeing if it could achieve that same effect when the tape machine is running backward. And the weird thing is that they basically get there. “Rising” is by no means the best song on the album, but it won’t cause you to jump up and turn it off when it comes on, either. So that’s Wooden Shjips for you: a band more inclined to come by its signature sound through ridiculous means than to switch up that sound more than a little bit.