The instrumental psych-leaning quartet Woodsman hail from Denver, an urban setting in a part of the U.S. where wilderness is abundant. You can imagine these guys know a thing or two about being in the backcountry. Despite their reliance on electronic elements and looping devices, their sound is naturalistic and reminiscent of some of the more outré acts from the late, great Jewelled Antler Collective, who would sometimes rely only on field recordings and scraped-pinecone sounds to evoke nature's aura. Woodsman's sound is a little more straightforwardly accessible than that, but they're still a group that concerns itself with capturing a "mood" above all else. Their latest release, the Mystery Tape EP, is drenched in the kind of sleepless, nocturnal dread you might feel while lost in the forest. Melodic figures repeat like mantras, while wisps of voices float in and out of these five tracks, left to dangle and remain unfinished.
But while there is an incantatory, shaman-like quality to Woodsman's sound, on the Mystery Tape EP the group exerts a type of restraint that was lacking in their previous full-length, Collages. Other like-minded acts might take this heady sound and jam its mechanisms with vocal whoops and "tribal" drums, but Woodsman possess a deep focus, keeping most of the pieces on this release under five minutes. These guys may jam in their spare time, but they're not making us listen to it. Instead, they create tightly-wound songs where everything evolves organically and unfolds on its own time.
Regardless of clarity, a dense, smoky fog hangs throughout the EP, and Woodsman do get a little lost during the 14-minute album closer, "Smells Like Purple". With that one exception, the band's sound cuts through the haze, generally refusing to slip into the background. The fact that they have two drummers, Eston Lathrop and Dylan Shumaker, helps. The grooves they lay into lock together like unevenly laid bricks, keeping time within each other's drum fills while adding a few rhythmic tics. At times, another guitar line is added to the mix, turning the dripping atmosphere of "Hocus Pocus" into something more immediate and lending an almost-beachy vibe to "Balance".
EP highlight "When the Morning Comes" finds Woodsman at their most transcendent. Wordless vocals stretch across a skipping drumbeat, while electronic sounds lay low in the background. Then, dense ambience rolls in, the beat drops out, and those patiently waiting electronic blips and bleeps erupt, spiraling upwards. If Woodsman keep on this path, perhaps they're headed that way as well.
