Wooden Shjips – West (Thrill Jockey)
4/5
By: Joe Daniels
Like the Golden Gate Bridge on the album sleeve, West is an album of industrial conquest. Churning guitars, fuzzed bass lines, psyched-out synths all align to form the cacophonous drone that has become Wooden Shjips’ stock trade. It’s a sort of aural assault, not dissimilar to post-rock stalwarts Swans; though this outfit replaces Michael Gira’s urgency with a much more laconic approach, the songs bullying the listener into submersion rather than submission.
Album opener ‘Black Smoke Rise’ sets both the tone and pace of proceedings as it pounds along with thudding instrumentals and chiming synths, both layered underneath a vocal line drawled so nonchalantly it exists almost entirely as a husk. It’s a sound consistent throughout the record, each song clocking in at around 5 minutes of aggressive, yet wholly melodic, ineffectualness that never – to its credit – verges on the disinterested arrogance of slacker rock.
Instead, West can be viewed as in the spirit of the Cale-led Velvets or JMC’s ‘Psychocandy’: it’s unhinged, violent, even confrontational, but utterly absorbing. Tracks like ‘Home’ and ‘Flight’ are both behemoths of drone – chugging around and crackling with intensity – that are as downright brash as they are riveting, and album-closer ‘Rising’ is almost formless in execution, boiling down to five minutes of loose, cool, dirge.
West, then, is an album of quite rare brilliance. It is able to affect a style, without detracting from substance. In short, it’s a post-rock album that is not afraid to rock.
Wooden Shjips - Lazy Bones by Fuse Group Australia
Artists in this article: Wooden Shjips
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