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CD
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WOODSIST 107CD
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"Woods are in bloom again, inviting you to disappear into a new spectrum of colors and sounds and dreams on Perennial. Formed in Brooklyn in 2004, Woods have matured into a true independent institution, above and below the root, reliably emerging every few years with new music that grows towards the latest sky. Operating the Woodsist label since 2006 and curating the beloved homespun Woodsist Festival for the musical universe they've built, Perennial is the sound of a band on the edge of their 20th anniversary and still finding bold new ways to sound like (and challenge) themselves. Perennial grew from a bed of guitar/keyboard/drum loops by Woods head-in-chief Jeremy Earl, a form of winter night meditation that evolved into an unexplored mode of collaborative songwriting. With Earl's starting points, he and bandmates Jarvis Taveniere and John Andrews convened, first at Earl's house in New York, then at Panoramic House studio in Stinson Beach, California, site of sessions for 2020's Strange To Explain. With a view of the sparkling Pacific and tape rolling, they began to build, jamming over the loops, switching instruments, and developing a few dozen building blocks. The album's resulting eleven songs, four of them instrumental, are in the classic Woods mode -- shimmering, familiar, fractionally unsettling -- but with the half-invisible infinity boxes of Earl's loops burbling beneath each like a mysterious underground source. From source to seed to bloom, each loop unfolds into something unpredictable, from the jeweled pop of the aching 'Little Black Flowers' to the ecstatic starlit freak-beat of 'Another Side.' They are blossomings both far-out and comforting, like the Mellotronic cloud-hopping of 'Between the Past,' or sometimes just plain comforting, like the widescreen snowglobe fantasia of the instrumental 'White Winter Melody,' touched by Connor Gallaher's pedal steel." --Jesse Jarnow
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LP
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WOODSIST 107LP
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LP version. "Woods are in bloom again, inviting you to disappear into a new spectrum of colors and sounds and dreams on Perennial. Formed in Brooklyn in 2004, Woods have matured into a true independent institution, above and below the root, reliably emerging every few years with new music that grows towards the latest sky. Operating the Woodsist label since 2006 and curating the beloved homespun Woodsist Festival for the musical universe they've built, Perennial is the sound of a band on the edge of their 20th anniversary and still finding bold new ways to sound like (and challenge) themselves. Perennial grew from a bed of guitar/keyboard/drum loops by Woods head-in-chief Jeremy Earl, a form of winter night meditation that evolved into an unexplored mode of collaborative songwriting. With Earl's starting points, he and bandmates Jarvis Taveniere and John Andrews convened, first at Earl's house in New York, then at Panoramic House studio in Stinson Beach, California, site of sessions for 2020's Strange To Explain. With a view of the sparkling Pacific and tape rolling, they began to build, jamming over the loops, switching instruments, and developing a few dozen building blocks. The album's resulting eleven songs, four of them instrumental, are in the classic Woods mode -- shimmering, familiar, fractionally unsettling -- but with the half-invisible infinity boxes of Earl's loops burbling beneath each like a mysterious underground source. From source to seed to bloom, each loop unfolds into something unpredictable, from the jeweled pop of the aching 'Little Black Flowers' to the ecstatic starlit freak-beat of 'Another Side.' They are blossomings both far-out and comforting, like the Mellotronic cloud-hopping of 'Between the Past,' or sometimes just plain comforting, like the widescreen snowglobe fantasia of the instrumental 'White Winter Melody,' touched by Connor Gallaher's pedal steel." --Jesse Jarnow
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WOODSIST 107XLP
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LP version. Color vinyl. "Woods are in bloom again, inviting you to disappear into a new spectrum of colors and sounds and dreams on Perennial. Formed in Brooklyn in 2004, Woods have matured into a true independent institution, above and below the root, reliably emerging every few years with new music that grows towards the latest sky. Operating the Woodsist label since 2006 and curating the beloved homespun Woodsist Festival for the musical universe they've built, Perennial is the sound of a band on the edge of their 20th anniversary and still finding bold new ways to sound like (and challenge) themselves. Perennial grew from a bed of guitar/keyboard/drum loops by Woods head-in-chief Jeremy Earl, a form of winter night meditation that evolved into an unexplored mode of collaborative songwriting. With Earl's starting points, he and bandmates Jarvis Taveniere and John Andrews convened, first at Earl's house in New York, then at Panoramic House studio in Stinson Beach, California, site of sessions for 2020's Strange To Explain. With a view of the sparkling Pacific and tape rolling, they began to build, jamming over the loops, switching instruments, and developing a few dozen building blocks. The album's resulting eleven songs, four of them instrumental, are in the classic Woods mode -- shimmering, familiar, fractionally unsettling -- but with the half-invisible infinity boxes of Earl's loops burbling beneath each like a mysterious underground source. From source to seed to bloom, each loop unfolds into something unpredictable, from the jeweled pop of the aching 'Little Black Flowers' to the ecstatic starlit freak-beat of 'Another Side.' They are blossomings both far-out and comforting, like the Mellotronic cloud-hopping of 'Between the Past,' or sometimes just plain comforting, like the widescreen snowglobe fantasia of the instrumental 'White Winter Melody,' touched by Connor Gallaher's pedal steel." --Jesse Jarnow
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WOODSIST 085LP
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2022 repress, color vinyl. Originally released in 2016. Red vinyl. "Received a 7.6 rating from Pitchfork. Woods have always been experts at distilling life epiphanies into compact chunks of psychedelic folk that exists just outside of any sort of tangible time or place. Maybe those epiphanies were buried under cassette manipulation or drum-and-drone freakouts, or maybe they were cloaked in Jeremy Earl's lilting falsetto, but over the course of an impressive eight albums, Woods refined and drilled down their sound into City Sun Eater in the River of Light, their ninth LP and second recorded in a proper studio. It's a dense record of rippling guitar, lush horns and seductive, bustling anxiety about the state of the world. It's still the Woods you recognize, only now they're dabbling in zonked-out Ethiopian jazz, pulling influence from the low-key simmer of Brown Rice, and tapping into the weird dichotomy of making a home in a claustrophobic city that feels full of possibility even as it closes in on you. City Sun Eater in the River of Light is concise, powerful, anxious -- barreling headlong into an uncertain, constantly shifting new world." --Sam Hockley-Smith
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WOODSIST 102LP
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"With no touring in 2020, and possibly this year, Woods decided to take a deep dive into their archives and put together the first volume of their much-discussed archival series, Reflections. Featuring rare and unreleased recordings from 2009-2013, including a ghost town desert jam off the side of the highway, their first live performance in Big Sur, the first recorded version of 'Bend Beyond' and some shelved diamonds in the rough that were finished up during quarantine. Their hope is that it plays like a 'lost record' from an extremely strange and fruitful period in Woods history."
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WOODSIST 102COL
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LP version. Color vinyl. "With no touring in 2020, and possibly this year, Woods decided to take a deep dive into their archives and put together the first volume of their much-discussed archival series, Reflections. Featuring rare and unreleased recordings from 2009-2013, including a ghost town desert jam off the side of the highway, their first live performance in Big Sur, the first recorded version of 'Bend Beyond' and some shelved diamonds in the rough that were finished up during quarantine. Their hope is that it plays like a 'lost record' from an extremely strange and fruitful period in Woods history."
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CD
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WOODSIST 099CD
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"Dreaming doesn't come easy these shadowed days, which is why Strange To Explain by Woods is such a welcome turning of new colors. It presents an extended moment of sweet reflection for the 15-year-old band, bouncing back to earth as something hopeful and weird and resolute. Like everything else they've recorded, it sounds exactly like themselves, but with subtly different shades and breaths and rhythmic feels and everything else that changes, the natural march of time and the intentional decisions of the musicians moving in what feels like an uncommonly organic alignment. Strange To Explain trades in a different kind of dependability, maintaining a steady connection to the voice on the other side of the record needle. After quickly recording and releasing 2017's Love Is Love in response to the tumultuous events of their (and our) 2016, Jeremy Earl and company took their time with what came next. Parenthood arrived, as did a short songwriting pause. The band went bicoastal when Jarvis Taveniere headed west. And when they returned to their posts, there on the other side of this particular mirror, they made this, an album that not only catches and holds and shares the light in yet another new way, but recognizes that there's still light to be caught, which is also no small thing. A bend beyond the last bend beyond, Woods keep on changing, thoughtfully and beautifully. The colors were always there, like trees blossoming just slightly differently each season, a synesthetic message coded in slow-motion. Recorded in Stinson Beach, the kind of place that seems like an AI simulation of an idyllic northern California coastal escape, the familiar jangling guitars recede to the background. John Andrews's warm keyboards and twining Mellotron rise around Earl's songs and dance across the chord changes like warm sunlight off the Pacific. The music feels a karmic landmass away from the creepiness of the uncanny valley." --Jesse Jarnow
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