"The Wooden Ships were just a hippy dream" wrote Neil Young to put his sometime cohorts Crosby, Stills and Nash in their place. He may have been right but if you smuggle on board a 'J' to turn the ships into 'shjips' who's to tell?
There's plenty of 60s style optimism and a healthy subcultural vibe behind the San Franciscan quartet, Wooden Shjips.
They specialise in stoner jams and no review of them can fail to use the word Psychedelic. Sometimes the adjective 'experimental' is added for good measure. This is frankly somewhat flattering for a band who borrow so obviously from sixties icons like Pink Floyd, The Doors, The Seeds and The Stooges.
You can almost visualise their record collection as you listen as references accumulate and I'd hazard a guess that their recent acquisitions includes a sizeable Japanese section. They are an American Acid Mothers Temple although they have some way to go to match AMT's formiddable output.
Vol.1 is confusingly their second album release through Holy Mountain and, moreover, this is really a collection of singles masquerading as an album.
Riding high on the interest garnered by their swaggering debut of 2007, the label have kindly gathered together their hard to find early vinyl releases.
It collects their debut single from 2006 - "Shrinking Moon for You" - together with tracks from a free 10-inch, the Dance, California 7-inch, and the SOL 7-inch. Just six tracks with a total playing time of just over half an hour.
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Shrinking Moon opens proceedings at a running time of 8 mins 37 seconds, an arbitrary length since it sounds like they could have continued the minimalist motorik groove for at least 80 minutes. Like the closing 11 + minutes of Sol '87 the pleasure is not in the diversity of their sound but in the hypnotic rhythms they conjure up from vintage organ, repetitive drum beats, fuzz guitars and occasional incoherent vocals.
Between these two tracks 'Death's Not Your Friend' appropriates Iggy's 'Raw Power' riff while the doctored speech on Space Clothes sounds like an intergalactic broadcast from Twin Peaks' red room'.
'Clouds Over Earthquake' is a spaced out slo-mo version of Sol'87 while the edit of 'Dance, California' gives a bite size psych-sample for the masses out there in radio land.
There's no variety, studio trickery or complex musicianship but for space heads everywhere this is a trip you can't afford to pass up.
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