After eight albums of solid, if ever-more-predictable, psych-folk in about as many years, do Woods have anything new to offer? The band answers that question before anybody can ask it on City Sun Eater in the River of Light, which opens with the most surprising departure of their entire discography: “Sun City Creeps,” a detour into reggae and African jazz, complete with island horns, trebly guitars and the loose, first-take feel of an early Studio One session. It’s a knockout song, even before the pace quickens during its jammy payoff stretch, yet the group adopts these tropical sounds so naturally that it never feels like they’re showing off. You can count on one hand the number of American rock bands that could tastefully pull off this sort of stylistic gambit—Calexico; maybe My Morning Jacket. Turns out Woods is one of them.
An opener like that stirs real excitement, and the assurance that the band hasn’t grown complacent is particularly well-timed, coming as it does after 2014’s With Light and With Love, a characteristically enjoyable but familiar-on-arrival LP that left even many Woods loyalists longing for a shakeup. To be sure, City Sun Eater isn’t a complete reinvention, either—it’s largely rooted in the same '60s pop and druggy Americana that’s defined all the band's records—but periodic shadings of reggae give the record a character of its own. Dubby organs lead “Can’t See At All,” which breathes like a classic Lee Perry track. Some moaning backing vocals are tracked so closely they sound like a wailing electronic gizmo, exactly the kind of lo-fi studio trickery that dub producers played with on their early efforts. Stately horns add gravity to the bongo-guided “The Take,” another number that patiently builds to a tweaked-out climax.
All of those tracks work because they’re never played as straight genre experiments; they all sound first and foremost like Woods songs, even when they draw from a different vocabulary than any that came before. And like all of Woods’ recent albums, City Sun Eater is generously packed with pop songs, too. With its delirious wah-wah guitars, closer “Hollow Home” imagines what a George Harrison cover of “Just Like Heaven” might have sounded like (utterly joyous, as expected). The song most guaranteed to make audiences twirl in the mud at their live shows, “Politics of Free” pairs the album’s pluckiest guitars and cheeriest tempo with a parade of uplifting aphorisms: “Find the time to separate your work life from relief/ Constellations in the summer sky/ In a world of shit/ Let’s tune out.”
For most acts, “Politics” would be the clear single, but Woods have never been much of a singles band. They don’t have much to gain from them, since singer Jeremy Earl’s thin voice still makes them a hard sell for wider audiences. On the group's scrappy early efforts it was easy to write off that untrained voice as part of the group’s rumpled charm, but as their albums have grown more deliberate, his anemic falsetto has become more of a nuisance—it’s the only one-note instrument in an act that otherwise wrings so much nuance out of all the other ones. Nine albums in, Woods are still turning out great tunes while tapping new muses, and that’s worth celebrating. But how great would it be if they had a singer who could really do them justice?
