Wooden Shjips, Stereo, Glasgow April 17th 2010.
We Ask You To Ride…First time I’ve been to the Stereo venue, it’s a great little place tucked down a lane, and when we arrived we tried to eat at the tables of its packed café/bar, one of those bare looking alternative places, but a half-hour wait till our order was ready meant missing the support acts, so we reluctantly left to go find a take-away.
But our fast food search turned out to be not so fast afterall, and on our return we’d missed the first of the groups. The second act was Trembling Bells and their late 60’s folk-psych style, with a strong female singer their range covered ballads, country, and rock, but what they produced as a band had no appeal for me, or for my companion at the gig. I could see how it fitted in with the evening in offering a contrast with what was to come, and when the Shjips eventually did perform their own distinctive blend of psychedelica the sheer power of their sound and their extremely tight playing just blew away all else before it. In Stereo’s compact gigging area we placed ourselves just a couple of metres from the front, where an eager crowd had completely filled up the underground performance space, a place with stone walls and a high ceiling above the stage and an aged interior that lends itself to the sense of rawness and intimacy that you get in a small venue.
The Shjips didn’t so much sail onto the stage (excuse the pun), but just slowly drifted into view at the edge, taking their ease to check equipment and positions. At stage left from our viewpoint the keyboard player Nash carried with him what looked like a large silver chunk of rock, this was his instrument covered up in BacoFoil. I don’t know if it’s decorated out of necessity, maybe its all beaten up, but wrapping it like that made me think about Mambo Art, and with its Lava Cave look it had a Kitsch pop style that wouldn’t have looked out of place on an old B-52’s album cover. Omar the drummer got behind his kit, looking like he had a head full of bed-hair, and the sloppy Joe vest and trackie bottoms he was wearing completed the illusion that he’d just woken up moments before. Vocalist and lead guitarist Ripley Johnson, together with Dusty Jermier on bass positioned themselves both to our right of stage. In visual style they are the two members of the group who most look like they have one foot in the past and the other in the present, with Dusty wearing his Lennon specs and flowing mane, and Ripley with a ZZ Top beard that’s clearly a work in progress, and for all the fashionista’s reading this, he was wearing levis red tab jeans! (as was pointed out to me by my fashion savvy gig companion).
Shine Like Suns Their casual manner, or was it rather ‘the confidently professional manner’ with which the Shjips began their show disguised momentarily the fact that they are a Fantastic Foursome of pulsating rhythm and hypnotic beat, and from the very beginning they drove forward a powerfully engaging sound that never let up for a single moment throughout the length of the gig. Prior to the show I was slightly apprehensive about seeing them live, a while back I’d read a positive review of one of their albums, but the reviewer had felt the need to qualify enjoying the album with stating that seeing them live was in his opinion just ‘loud and repetitious’. As I was going along with someone who’d only heard, and liked, a few tracks of an album, there was the possibility that one or the other of us was going to be disappointed that night.
Fortunately for me it was a great show from the word go, and even better, my companion loved it and was completely enthusiastic about the sound and the performance. The only down-side to the gig was that as it’s a small place and we were standing only a few metres away from the speakers our ‘sonic high’ left us with a dull ringing sound in our ears for at least the next 24 hours, I can honestly say that’s the longest spell of post-venue deafness I’ve ever experienced.
The Shjips is a sound of retro future, it takes you back to something that never quite was, defining a fantasy from music past, suspending those ‘far-out’ moments of 60’s experimentalism and 70’s cosmic rock, restructuring acid-trance-inducing moments back into the present via similar routes through 80’s and 90’s alternative guitar and dance grooves, in fact,
groove is firmly at the heart of their mission. I think what’s also fun about them is that you can throw a few cheesy old hippie descriptions up into the air that in another time, another place, would be completely apt:
cosmic,
mind-bending,
trip-inducing.., but at the same time they are also thoroughly modern, and aware enough to hone down any relationship with latter-day progressive experi-meandering, turning it into a sleek production that’s precise and sharply cut into shape almost as if a machine took all the musical elements that inspired the band and turned these into a beautifully polished creation.
The truth is though that there’s no machine, it’s all down to sheer human musicianship, and during the set I became transfixed by Ripley, his body language, the sheer commitment to his instrument, and Dusty Jermier’s guitar playing was often as intense. I’ve never been a big fan of the guitar, but I was surprised by what felt like an industrial onslaught, completely overwhelming and transporting me into a fantasy of sound that echoed an abstraction of seasons past, and much further, to a period when I would have been a child oblivious to the alternative music of the time. Its music I would love to fully have experienced as an adult, but with the Shjips I’m given a modernist synthesis of it, a distorted Doors, a hazy Velvet Underground, and the misheard rumble of many an unknown garage band of past times. Watching Ripley and Dusty play I couldn’t help but be aware of the irony that this fantasy was being generated by guys younger than myself, take away the hair and beard and Ripley and Dusty seem so very much younger, just two guy’s on guitar, and all hail electricity and the guitar, a fantastic synthesiser of sound and emotional shock treatment straight to the heart and the psyche.
Blue Sky BendsThere's two modes of song for the Shjips, the gently rocky toe-tapping style, great for travelling on a journey to, and then there’s the laid back dreamy style, great for drifting off to, and both fitted neatly together at the gig to create one long tapestry of sound being mapped out by occasional changes in guitar riff, and Ripley’s hazy vocal style, a voice that teases you with its momentary discernable lyrics that are quickly snatched away into a cloud of reverberated wonder.
Critics of the band suggest that they have just three songs and everything else is repetition, but the Shjips are skilfully in control of the subtleties of the sound they make, which in the hands of lesser artists would just fall flat. Prior to the present line-up the band formed and began playing together as untrained musicians with this philosophy:
”the idea is that anyone can create music, and maybe training just gets in the way of true expression”, and Google a bit and you get what amounts to outrageous admiration for them, such as this fantastic description written by a fan:
” The experience of Wooden Shjips has been equated to that of the Japanese phenomenon called maboroshi, which is somewhat similar to seeing a mirage or hallucinating in time. In the context of imagination/dreams, maboroshi is attributed to past occurrences and can take on a meaning like 'phantoms.' The group's songs seem to exist in a dream state in which anything is possible”For me the sound of the Shjips is mesmerising and uplifting, and I’d definitely put them in that category of ‘musicians who make you feel like you are dreaming while you are awake’, and if an artist can do that for me then I’m a happy bunny…
Andreas
