Artist: Wooden Shjips Album: Back To Land (2013) With the passing of Lou Reed, weve been consistently reminded of the Velvet Undergrounds geographic, spiritual, and financial disconnect from the dominant hippy-dippy rock bands of the day, most of which hailed from California. But now that rock n roll itself has become ever more disconnected from the contemporary popular-music landscape, the similarities between the New York and San Fran schools of late-60s psychedelia are more pronounced than the differences. Sure, the Velvets favored viscera over virtuosity, but they ultimately share the same goal as their Pacific nemeses: to explode the parameters of the pop song through improvised, trance-inducing experimentation. But in case that connection isnt explicit enough, we have Wooden Shjips, a band that, for the past 6 years, has been gradually folding the musical legacies of the east and the west, and the under- and overground, into one another. and Back To Land marks the moment when they perfectly intersect. (from pitchfork (11-15-13)) youtube/watch?v=PORyCJYpeL0
Posted on: Sun, 17 Nov 2013 16:16:46 +0000