Woods‘ excellent new album City Sun Eater in the River of Light is out April 8th via Woodsist Records and in addition to vinyl, CD and cassette, you can also get it as a skateboard. The band have partnered with Habitat to create a deck with the new album’s artwork that will come with a download of the album.
As far as the BV team goes, I think I’m in the minority for never really caring about Woods. I usually check out each new album, think it’s fine, and never return to it. But City Sun Eater In The River of Light has the band exploring some new ground, and it’s the first one that’s had me itching to play it again. It’s not a major departure from their usual ’60s-psych revival, but it definitely pushes Woods’ sound past its usual comfort zone. The band brings in bold horns on “The Take” and album opener “Sun City Creeps,” the former of which is backed by hand drums and a funky bassline, and the latter of which takes a guitar solo straight from the Summer of Love. The album’s most distinct (and possibly) finest moment is “Can’t See At All,” which has the kind of reggae/funk that’s usually saved for the jam band world these days, and a melody that feels nicked from Odessey and Oracle. Singer Jeremy Earl’s falsetto is a main draw as always, and it’s not crazy to suggest he sounds better than ever. He’s also melodically sharp, as he shows off on the addictive chorus to the folky “Morning Light.” They shine when he’s not singing too. On “I See In The Dark,” they’ve got extended jams that find the middle ground between hypnotic, driving krautrock and the free-form soloing of early psych. If you didn’t think Woods had any growth left in them, this album crushes that belief.
3rd Single from the new Woods album, City Sun Eater in the River of Light, out April 8th, 2016 on Woodsist.
The band have also just released a third track for the album, “Morning Light,” which is more what most people expect from Woods than the horn-filled first two released singles. It’s a lovely bit of West Coast sunshine and you can stream it below.
Woods’ are on tour with Ultimate Painting starts in April and will hit Brooklyn’s Music Hall of Williamsburg
“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, 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.
The Fat Angel Sings 