++GIG REVIEW++
Polly Rappaport slips a tab of acid on her tongue and floats on down the stream to Wooden Shjips - San Francisco's answer to Dead Meadow. Warning: this review contains some strong strobe effects...
If you heard this music ricocheting off the walls of a local record shop, you’d more than likely assume that the wizened old hipster behind the counter had just stuck on an obscure vinyl he’d acquired back in the psychedelic ‘60s.
In actual fact, the sinus-clearing reverb-erb-erb, stoner vocals and industrial-strength-hoover drone are the work of San Francisco’s Wooden Shjips (don’t worry about the spelling… just go with it, dig?).
This is a band who’ve drunk the drips from the acid droppers of both The Doors and The Velvet Underground – then laced it with a bit of Kraftwerk diesel oil for texture.
"Some in the crowd are gormless, hypnotised by the melty, spinny projections... "
The result is filthy bass lines, squelching guitars, sinister tambourine jangles and a level of distortion that’s comparable only to the reception you’d get listening to a pirate radio station based on Mars.
The band aren’t big on vocals, and even when the lyrics do come echoing through the haze, the words are utterly lost. It matters not though; tonight the band have transformed Cargo into a time warp of long hair, love beads and bushy beards.
It would be great to see the reaction of a punter who’d just wandered in off the street: some folks have their eyes closed, sagely nodding along to what ever frequency their brain has picked up. Others are gormless, hypnotised by the melty, spinny, screensaver projections on stage. And then there’s the Hardcore at the front, whose Jesus hair is flying in full-on freak out mode as they surf the Shjips’ California psych waves.
The music must be good when you’re half way through a pint of watery, weak cider and you find yourself staring at the pattern on some bloke’s shirt and thinking, ‘Dude. Like…whoa.’
++ Polly Rappaport ++
Artrocker rating: 3
The newest sounds as heard in the Artrocker Office and our Resonance FM podcast.
++ full details ++
Post new comment