Pertinent facts about the Wooden Shjips gig on Thursday night : Number of people in attendance- around 200. Number of girls in attendance- around 8. Average hair length of audience- around 6 inches. Percentage of audience in hoodies- around 50%. Percentage of audience with beards- around 40%. That should give you an idea of the main audience for the Wooden Shjips’ extended, mildly hypnotic, wandering psych jams (FULL DISCLOSURE: I myself have a beard and was wearing a hoodie at the gig, I fit the profile). This isn’t meant as a criticism; the music is legitimate and shouldn’t be dismissed as pointless noodling to provide a soundtrack for couch-based recreational drug use by non-contributing members of society (not that there’s anything wrong with that). That being said though, Wooden Shjips is definitely a great couch band, the kind of unhurried music where you want to relax, chill, and just live in the non-threatening vibes flowing out from the speakers for a little while.
A live show is another story though. The gig environment is a lot different than the living room environment and in my mind the Wooden Shjips formula doesn’t come off very well in a live setting. For the uninitiated the formula is basically as follows: come up with a simple bassline for a lovely, fat, warm basstone, put some steady drums behind it, then ride it for six minutes with a guitar riff on top and flesh it out with some old school organ sounds and snatches of heavily reverbed vocals, allowing for noisy guitar solo detours from time to time. It’s a really good formula and they execute it really well, but the positives sort of become negatives when you’re standing in one spot and focusing on the band up on stage. The first 30 minutes are fun, but then the songs start bleeding into one another, your attention wanders, and you begin to get bored.
I dig Wooden Shjips. I dig their records, have a couple of them on vinyl. I dig that Wooden Shjips are obviously one of those bands that just feel so right ON vinyl. I dig the rad tshirt I got at the gig which is a wild Dog Magus orbited by eyeballs and geometric symbols. I dig the guitar player’s wildly forked four inch beard (serious dedication right there) and how they’re legit modern hippies rather than a bunch of kids aping a bygone era. And I really wanted to dig the concert. But until they figure out how to work what they do into a more dynamic, more engaging, more vibrant live show it’s always going to be their weakest link.
Marcus O’Sullivan
