Babies

Hey, look, it's a review!

THE BABIES
Our House on the Hill
(Woodsist)

A second album from this Vivian Girls/Woods collaboration cleans up the sonics a bit, but leaves the Babies sweetly blurred, folk-garage drone sloppiness intact. Kevin Morby, elsewhere the bass player for Woods, carries most of the weight, writing and singing lead on all but a couple of songs, putting slack vulnerability into even the rawest, most ragged riffs (see "Get Lost") and rasping Dylan-folk style on plaintive "Mean." Cassie Ramone plays along on guitar, chips in airy whoa-oh-ohs and brassy counterpoints, additionally taking the mic on two cuts, "Baby" and "See the Country."


Still, the magic in Our House on the Hill comes when these two merge their two particular vibes, shading country-psych with Velvet Underground-ish murk, sweetening plainspoken lo-fi with giddy girl group flourishes. "Moonlight Mile" is the album's standout, a dense propulsive mesh of jangly guitars, rumbling bass, monochrome punk rants (that's Morby) and swirling wordless swoons (that's Ramone). It's the track on the album that feels least sketched, most colored in; and it, along with Ramone's "Baby" and Morby's "Get Lost," give you a sense of what this band might accomplish as a full-fledged endeavor, rather than a side project.


But there's charm even in the most skeletal offerings, the woozy, reticent romance of "On My Team," the disconsolately folkish "Mean," the back-handed ease with which these two musicians finish each other's sentences in "Slow Walking." Sure this House on the Hill could be more soundly constructed, but one suspects that ricketiness is part of the appeal.



DOWNLOAD: "Moonlight Mile," "Baby" -JENNIFER KELLY

Woods and Amps for Christ fuse folk with noise

Another one of those split CDs from stylistically aligned artists...in this case, the pieces seem complementary, but you do not see a lot of active mutual influencing. (For example, there's not much "here's Amps sounding a bit like Woods" or vice versa...at least no more than there would have been before the split.) Anyway, enjoyed the album, couple of really good songs on it. My review at Dusted today:

Woods/Amps for Christ
Woods/Amps for Christ
Shrimper

In Amps for Christ, Henry Barnes may have, in some ways, anticipated Woods’ noise-inflected folk pop. Coming out of hardcore and metal in the mid-1990s, he explored ways to place churning distortion in harmony with delicate, multi-ethnic plucking, sounding more like latter day Woodsist outfits (Woods, but also MV +EE) than first wave lo-fi bands (Sentridoh, GBV etc.). This split CD shows how the two bands are closely aligned but distinct from one another, with slightly different approaches to the blend of buzz, drone and melody.

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Woods feature

I've got a pretty long, pretty complicated feature up right now at PopMatters about Woods the band and Woodsist the label, which I was really proud of until it turned out that there were four-five fairly minor factual errors in it, which the source pointed out , and now I don't want to ever do a feature again. But, bad luck, I'm interviewing Wreckless Eric and Amy Rigby later today, so right back on the horse.

Here's the Woods thing:

Out of the Woods: The Freaky Beautiful World of Woodsist
By Jennifer Kelly 12 July 2010
You can call it bucolic psychedelia. You can make comparisons to the Beach Boys or the Grateful Dead. You can evoke campfires and fireflies and beachside keg parties. But when you’re aiming to describe the hand-made, DIY aesthetic that surrounds the band Woods, the labels Woodsist and Fuckit Tapes and the loose fellowship of fellow travelers that surrounds them, please don’t use the term “lo-fi.”


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