With the passing of Lou Reed, we’ve been consistently reminded of the Velvet Underground’s 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 evermore 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 shared 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 isn’t explicit enough, we have Wooden Shjips, a band that, for the past six 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 the Land marks the moment when they perfectly intersect.
The band’s fourth album heads further into the earthier direction of its 2011 predecessor, West, and casts even more radiant rays of Golden State sunshine onto the band’s once-foreboding hypno-drone-rock. Its eight songs still adhere to Shjips’ trusty game plan—get to the jam, stat. But if they’re sticking to the same procedural formula, they’re changing the inputs to achieve a more harmonious balance of light and dark, crossbreeding left-field figureheads with right-of-the-dial mainstays: the oscillating psych-blues swing of “Ruins” puts the Can in Canned Heat; “Ghouls” rides the Modern Lovers’ “Roadrunner” to the corner of Haight-Ashbury; “In the Roses” imagines Suicide headlining Monterrey; “Servants” flips the old rumor about Iggy Pop replacing Jim Morrison in the Doors by having the Lizard King front the Stooges.
However, the Shjips' firm grasp of their influences and inflexible M.O. essentially negates the possibility of this band ever really surprising you. All of these songs basically begin in full swing, and from the first moment, you can easily predict how they’re going to play out—formalities like verses and lyrics merely represent toll booths that are quickly bypassed en route to the open road. And yet, for a band that obviously wants to steer clear of pop-song structures, Wooden Shjips’ freewheeling guitar odysseys do little to disrupt or reshape their surroundings, and the more easy-going, smooth-sailing energy in effect here means the songs rarely make the leap from pleasant to powerful.
So it’s doubly ironic that the most conventionally rendered track on Back to Land is also its most revelatory: With the closing “Everybody Knows”, Wooden Shjips embark on their maiden voyage into melancholic (if still fuzzed-out) balladry, and it’s a rewarding one at that. As usual, frontman Ripley Johnson’s words are barely decipherable above the song's Crazy Horse haze, but the affecting, crestfallen feeling he invests in his performance cuts through loud and clear. Whether this breakthrough portends a change in course remains to be seen, but, at this point in their consistent-to-a-fault career, it's encouraging to hear Wooden Shjips draw the emotion out of their motion.
