Woods - At Echo Lake
Why do people like indie rock? Do you have any ideas? You might say it’s because it’s cool—i.e. being into what was once ‘underground’ music suggests you’re a savvy person of discerning taste who reviles the middlebrow mainstream. You might say it’s because, on the whole, indie artists care about artistic integrity and making something that interacts with both past and present as part of a cultural conversation. You might even argue that indie rock as we know it today is simply puffed-up navel gazing music for middle class white kids who spend all day glued to their computers. Viable arguments can be made for any of these. However, for the purpose of this review, I’d like to suggest a slightly different line of thinking. The last couple years have seen an increased interest in and conversation about cassette culture. It’s easy to chalk it up to cyclical nostalgia, but there’s an element of fearful regression in it too. As more and more of our personal lives (and interactive brain functions) get moved online and our world becomes increasingly networked and info-loaded, we find ourselves wishing for slightly ‘outdated’ modes of privacy, community, and technology. Like mp3s, tapes are cheap, portable, and somewhat durable, but unlike mp3s they can’t be instantaneously copied and distributed millions of times over. They can’t be chopped up and shared song by song, either, something we lovers of the album format lament the slow disappearance of. While they may distribute a lot of their work digitally (and owe pretty much all their notoriety to the blogosphere), Woods are a band firmly rooted in the old-fashionedness of cassette culture.
At Echo Lake is Woods’ sorta fifth album (prior to last year’s Songs of Shame, it’s tough to chart when they released what in what format) and it finds the flanneled Brooklynites sticking to their fuzzy home-recorded guns on eleven very agreeable psych-damaged folk rock tunes. For a band so reputedly prone to extended improvisations and noodly jams, it’s actually a very compact and user-friendly record. Only opener “Blood Dries Darker” makes it past the four minute mark and the entire album stops just short of half an hour. The lead guitars that often strayed off into dissonance and near-pointlessness on Shame have largely been given a sunny psych pop tune-up. And yet, there remains an essential eeriness or sense of mystery that has always been one of the band’s greatest strengths. It seems to grow out of a combination of Jeremy Earl’s nasal, unmistakably Neil Young-ish voice (what grown man would choose to sing like that?), their often opaque lyrics, and the creaky living room vibe of their recordings. This comparison might get me into trouble, but in a way I’m reminded of The Shins’ shadowy first album. Both records have a distinct connection to 60s psych but sound knowingly modern, and both play their emotional cards very close to their chests. There seems to be the hint of a smirk in both, but they refuse to confront us. You can never quite remember a song from Oh Inverted World exactly how it goes, and At Echo Lake floats along with the same evasiveness.
Oh, yeah, the songs. They still follow the heavy Young influence from Woods’ past work. Earl’s earthy acoustic guitar strums loosely at the core of most every number here, grounding the fanciful bleariness of some of the lead guitars and tape-effected vocals on songs like “Pick Up,” “Death Rattles,” or “I Was Gone.” There’s also a fair amount of textural variety once you unpack the lower fidelity sonics. “Time Fading Lines” features heavy hand drums (djembe, perhaps?), while standout “Deep” makes use of Latin tinged guitar lines and canned—maybe even synthesized—hand claps, which ends up sounding something like The Ruby Suns’ Sea Lion. Tape technician G. Lucas Crane folds in odd bits of static and mild squalls of feedback on songs like “Mornin’ Time,” further coloring Woods’ sound with the incidental griminess of outmoded technology.
That, of course, brings us back to the cassette culture theme I began with. Combine the eerie, mysterious quality of the band’s songwriting with the regressive, communal privacy of old fashioned tape trading and you’ve got a breed of appeal that I think a lot of people find central to this indie subculture. Albums like At Echo Lake don’t usually set the internet on fire. They don’t make critics’ year-end, best-of-the-best lists and they don’t often inspire new sub-genres and mini memes. In one sense, the intentional distance of a record like this can make it seem flat, even disposable, but its melodic pleasantness makes it perfectly at home in your car stereo. Dig a little deeper and you find that the dodgy inscrutability becomes an alluring puzzle. It’s like a private gift from someone you’ll never meet. Pop records—even a lot of contemporary popular indie ones—exchange this quality for transparency and wide, attention-grabbing appeal. Maybe we like Woods because they don’t beg for our attention, luring us back instead with the feeling that they’re about to let us in on something secret. Naturally, it’s all the more fascinating when they don’t.
