white fence - s/t – woodsist –cd – 12$
Wander into the sweltering Cali smog to find yourself transported into a lysergic pop netherworld, where White Fence carves broad strokes of color into your mind. Coming on like Love in a Lollipop Shoppe, or Chris Knox abusing a Vox, the record oscillates between a sun-dappled English meadow, a crumbling SoCal suburban bedroom, and a riotous Sunset Strip leather gang knife fight, with the kind of warped precision and purity that marks the wolves from the sheep and the profound from the pretend in this instant online age. You know what I mean.
"White Fence is one man, Tim Presley, singer in garage-soul band Darker My Love, player on The Fall album Reformation Post TLC and now full-time member of The Strange Boys. Amid all this band-hopping, he's managed to record an LP of lysergic psychedelic songs (think: Arthur Lee without the budget and the guns)."
-Joel Wright
moon duo - escape – woodsist – lp – 15$
San Francisco’s Moon Duo was formed in 2009 by Sanae Yamada and Erik Johnson (Wooden Shjips). Inspired initially by the legendary duo of John Coltrane and Rashied Ali, Moon Duo counts such variant groups as Silver Apples, Royal Trux, Moolah, Suicide, and Cluster as touchstones. Utilizing primarily guitar, keyboards, percussion and vocals, the duo plays space against form to create a primordial and disorienting sonic stew. The group released two acclaimed records in 2009: the debut 12″ single, Love on the Sea, on Sick Thirst, and the Killing Time EP on Sacred Bones. Their follow-up long-player, Escape, on Woodsist, marks the fullest realization yet of the young group’s evolving sound.
-woodsist
art museums - rough frame – woodsist – lp – 15$
The Art Museums tell sordid tales of artists, lovers & poseurs with cult new wave jangle. Bay Area psych burnouts, Josh Alper & Glenn Donaldson (Skygreen Leopards) converged in San Francisco in the Summer of ‘09 to record Anglophile jams on a Tascam 388 tape machine (state of the art home-recording circa ‘85). Rough Frame is their debut LP for the Woodsist label. They would make a hi-fi studio record if they had the money, but reviewers would probably still say it was lo-fi. The Art Museums ARE into: art, poetry, WHAAM records & films about Mods…The Art Museums ARE NOT into: flared trousers, drip coffee, dirty sneakers.
-woodsist
sun araw –boat trip – woodsist – 12" – 15$
Boat Trip might be some hidden soundtrack to Donkey Kong warp-whistling straight into Ayahuasca Country. In about twenty minutes Sun Araw manages to navigate a psychedelic jungle cruise through canopy din & spooked drone, then he noses the boat out of the water and lifts into uncharted dub-spheres. The back half of this entranced tour is like being (fortunately) trapped inside an old Upsetters jam played at half-speed with twice the shaman-chant and reverb drenched percussion. Normally we wouldn't trust taking this kind of trip with just anybody, but with wheel and rudder alike in the hands of Magic Lantern co-captain Cameron Stallones, we can sip our yage-of-choice in peace and share the Sun Araw vision as one. Originally issued on Stunned Records as a limited CDR, here it gets the deluxe vinyl treatment. Limited to 500 on black vinyl.-woodsist
woods - at echo lake – woodsist – cass – 7$
"With a title like At Echo Lake the fifth album from New York’s Woods intimates a modern rock aesthetic fully informed by historical manifestations of teenage along with a concomitant feel for the specifics of time and place. The distance between 2007’s At Rear House and 2010’s At Echo Lake may at first seem only semantic but it more properly represents a move from a kind of informal back porch jam ethos to a fully-committed vision of the infinite possibilities of group playing. Over the past few years Woods have established themselves as an anomaly in a world of freaks. They were an odd proposition even in the outré company of vocalist/guitarist/label owner Jeremy Earl’s Woodsist roster, perpetually out of time, committed to songsmanship in an age of noise, drone and improvisation, to extended soloing, oblique instrumentals and the usurping use of tapes and F/X in an age of dead-end singer-songwriters. Recent live shows have seen them best confuse the two, playing beautifully-constructed songs torn apart by fuzztone jams and odd electronics. At Echo Lake feels like a diamond-sharp distillation of the turbulent power of their live shows, in much the same way that The Grateful Dead’s “Dark Star” single amplified and engulfed the planetary aspect of their improvised takes. Some of the material here – the opening “Blood Dries Darker”, the euphoric “Mornin’ Time” – is so lush that lesser brains would’ve succumbed to the appeal of strings and horns but At Echo Lake is more Fifth Dimension than Notorious Byrd Brothers, nowhere more so than on “From The Horn”, a track that is as beautiful in its assault on form as “Eight Miles High” or Swell Maps’ “Midget Submarines”. But despite the instrumental innovation that the album heralds – G. Lucas Cranes’ psychedelic tapework on “Suffering Season”, guest musician Matthew Valentine’s harmonica and modified banjo/sitar on “Time Fading Lines” – At Echo Lake is all about the vocals. Woods’ secret weapon is the quality of Earl’s voice, osmosing the naive style of Jad Fair, Jonathan Richman and Neil Young while re-thinking it as a discipline and a tradition. Here he is singing at the peak of his powers, in a high soulful style that is bolstered by heavenly arrangements of backing vocals. At Echo Lake feels like the transmission point for teenage garage from the past to the future. Deformed by contemporary experiments, bolstered by magical traditions from the past, it’s the sound of now, right here, At Echo Lake."
-David Keenan/Glasgow/March 2010
woods - songs of shame – woodsist – lp – 15$
The fourth full length by Woods, Songs of Shame, rips deeper with both 90 second and 10 minute
forays into skeletal psychedelia. This is not to say their idiosyncratic songwriting style & vocalizing
is not present in spades but expanded, colored, and twisted into a tie-dye of soundscapes. Road worn,
windblown, and deeply grooved. First edition of 1,100 on reverse stock jackets with printed inner sleeve.
-woodsist
real estate - s/t – woodsist – lp – 15$
"Real Estate waft in on vibes of hazy summers past. The New Jersey quartet of Martin Courtney IV, Matthew Mondanile III, Etienne Pierre Duguay and Alex Bleeker cut the sleeves short and the pop smooth to shade you from the midday heat. Every song works its way to that part of your consciousness that reveled in the fleeting waves of freedom that eked in once classes broke and the sun lingered a little longer over suburban roofs. And with three quarters of the band holding down Garden State roots its no surprise that a bit of Jersey indie-pop heritage sneaks its way into their sound, lifting the most sun streaked moments from The Feelies and Yo La Tengo and filtering them through the kaleidoscope of memories aimless drives through parched neighborhood streets. Martin Courtney's songwriting has a way of wrapping up the immediacy of youth with the ennui of age for the perfect shade of bittersweet bliss, mind you though, much heavier on the sweet than the bitter. Add to this Mondanile's (Ducktails/ Predator Vision) shimmering guitar strains full of equal parts sea foam and beer foam, pepper in the boardwalk clatter of Duguay's drums Bleeker's staccato low end and the perfect afternoon is just a lawn chair and boom box away."-Andy French / Raven Sings The Blues
warmer milks – in this room – fuck it tapes – cass – 7$