Album Of The Week: Wooden Shjips Back To Land

For a band of cloudy-eyed cosmonaut warlocks, Wooden Shjips sure do sound friendly, and they're only getting friendlier with time. The band started out as the resident mystics of the Bay Area garage-rock underground, cranking out fried DIY variations on the Stooges/Suicide/Spacemen 3 grooving-into-infinity blueprint on random barely-available vinyl singles and such. But even then, there was a melodic heft to those circular rhythms; they weren't interested in testing anyone's patience. On 2011's West, the band's third album and their first recorded in an actual studio, they tamed some of their wilder influences, added a healthy dose of Sabbath to their kraut-fuzz mix, and cranked out the sort of tunes that you might want to crank in your Camaro on the way to laser-Floyd night at the planetarium. Back To Land, their newest, bears evidence of a possible recent Neil Young fixation. Since West, half of the band moved to Portland, where they recorded this one, and now there's some lazy acoustic back-porch strumming mixed in with the highway-of-your-dreams reverb-drones. And by discovering their softer side, Wooden Shjips have made the most compulsively listenable album of their career, the one best-suited for activities other than staring and black-light posters or watching Star Trek: The Motion Picture on mute.