Chewing Pine

Wooden Shjips: An Understanding of the Earth

(This originaly appeared in Skyscraper #29)

There is something indiscernibly different about San Francisco. You can’t head down any street in the Bay Area and not wonder what event transpired there that in some small way managed to unknowingly affect your life. Looking up at the row houses, ornamented and displaying a cache of personality not found too many other places in the US, one should wonder, “Who lived here?”

The answer to that question might not be one to shake humanity, but the city itself shakes alone. Precariously perched upon destruction, daily life sweeps the specter of earthquakes and fire underneath the constant activity of the city.

The Wooden Shjips, though, aren’t so easily dispensed. Birthed from equal parts of a by-gone ‘60s idealism and the dirty underbelly emitted from the dry prose of Dashiell Hammett, the quartet of Ripley Johnson (guitar/vocals), Nash Whalen (keys), Omar Ahsanuddin (drums) and Dusty Jermier (bass/trumpet) don’t seek to disrupt social or musical notions. They just want to play music.

A 2006 single, “Dance, California” b/w “Clouds Over the Earthquake,” commemorated the centennial of an early 20^th century quake that left San Francisco debilitated. But why would the Shjips dedicate two sides of a single to such an event?

Over the phone keyboardist Whalen recalls, “Earthquakes are one of those things that are just here. I first moved to San Francisco in 1989 – I experienced the Loma Prieta earthquake first hand and saw the destruction. There were dozens and dozens of aftershocks for months. Almost twenty years later, that whole experience stayed with me. I always just think about the power of the earth and what it can do. And how it really, if it wanted to shake things up and take us out – it could.”

In listening to the Shjips various singles collected on Volume One (Holy Mountain, 2008), there is a rather developed consistency that runs through not just this compilation, but the band’s Self Titled (Holy Mountain, 2007) album as well. The melodic concepts are virtually indecipherable from track to track, largely due to the great amount of reverb and fuzz doused on each note of the guitar. The uniformity found in each of the Shjips songs is actually just the band hinting at notes and dancing around discernable melodic lines. But it is very possible that Johnson and his cohort have some abstruse notion about how songs actually work.

A telling quote culled from the vast tubes of the internet finds Johnson explaining that his main goal as a member of this band is really to create dance music – something to make concert goers sway.

“We do have an element who come out and dance and it’s really great especially when they’re right in-front of the stage and your able to see them responding,” Whalen emotes, working to confirm Johnson’s direction for the band and its music.

This statement of purpose from Johnson rings true. From the initial bass thud that announces “We Ask You to Ride,” the opening track of the self titled disc, there is a non-stop rhythmic pulse ideal for dancing. Whether conscious or not, a great number of the titles from this same album hint at motion – riding, bending and dancing all encourage listeners to let go and simply allow the repetitive, simplistic statements to be physically manifested in dance. What again obscures the purpose of the music are its other elements.

The ceaseless low end pulsations driving dancers, guitar feed-back that imbues each track with texture and the indistinguishable vocals compound the mystical and undefined aura that surrounds the Shjips. But these aural inclinations, at least, have a very definite source: High Rise. Johnson’s professed admiration for the Japanese psych band and specifically the group’s disc entitled II, is instantly sensible given the aggressive guitar tones, fuzz and confusingly unclear vocals. Here too, acknowledging a concrete link to an esoteric act, which hasn’t released a recording in over a decade, Johnson explains the band in terms that few can readily conceive of.

Possibly amplified by Johnson’s references to obscure acts, Wooden Shjips have found themselves unable to escape from comparisons to the tripped out sounds that sprung from 1960’s San Francisco – or even the ‘60s in general.

Jefferson Airplane too frequently has been made a touchstone in this guessing game, linking the band to a bygone era. So too have the Doors, a Southern Californian group, whose only commonality with Wooden Shjips is the darkness that its sound exudes.

Yet due to cultural elitism, the Dead have some how managed to evade being thrown into this equivocal ring of comparisons. On the Dead’s eponymous 1967 debut, “Cream Puff War” sits one third of the way through offering some of the most aggressive and electric moments from the band’s studio history. Springing forth from this single track is the fuzz that current garage bands fawn over alongside political discourse masquerading as an interpersonal relationship. Here, Wooden Shjips can perhaps be figured to have been birthed. In the dominant discourse of current indie music, though, the Dead are too frequently marginalized. Of course, the comparison, like previous links to the past aren’t necessarily confirmed by band members, but it isn’t dismissed either.

“In our band, we have no distaste for the Dead,” begins Whalen.

“Ripley will still put on some bootleg from the ‘70s or ‘80s that he’s always liked and listened to for decades. It’s nothing that we’re afraid of,” he continues amidst some of his most assured rhetoric. “They were a melting pot of American music anyway. There were so many different elements in their music that it’s easy for us to draw from that and still draw from the Velvets frame work. I know that stigma, we don’t worry about that,” he concludes confidently.

While discussing the tendencies of the Dead to play loose with its song structures, Whalen is able to differentiate between his group’s studio efforts and its sound during live shows as he guesses, “I think that we do something different live, but it’s still true to the music. It’s just a live experience…I don’t think that we play our songs twice the same way.”

In noting differentiation in the band’s songs, Whalen again moves towards defining the group through the vagueness of experimentation. Not experimentation in the sense of something wholly different and new – Wooden Shjips are, after all, a rock band. But referring to a “live experience” serves to explicate the lack of totality in its musicianship. Songs may have structure, albeit unrefined, but given to live environs, the songs do as they please.

Further verbal dissections of individual songs lead to questioning how the process of song writing and the group’s creative tendencies actually work.

The notion of jamming seems to be recalled repeatedly by Whalen. Revealing that each song can’t have “too much or too little” of any one element. Whalen meanders to the point that, their process is almost a non-process: one where musicians are musicians and songs simply begin and end.

Everything about this band – its initial inclination to give away records for free, lack of domestic touring, and strict adherence to the most vague of musical codes – screams obscurity. Even the cover of its self-titled album depicts the quartet seated nonchalantly in front of a rather standard looking San Franciscan home replete with a short flight of steps up to the front door. Each band member’s face is ominously distorted so that no singular feature can be surmised. The drab black and white of the photo seems in direct contrast to the psychedelic music it purports. The album’s physical presentation is misleading, but so too are assumptions that may commonly accompany popular underground musical acts.

This vagueness persists in the uncertainty of much of Whalen’s discourse which eventually leads to his feelings towards the area that the band finds itself living and how the vast differentiation from other parts of the country affects the players in this ensemble. This realization, of course, comes through the back door of his collegiate studies in Geology.

“I have a great understanding of the earth now. And geologically. San Francisco is a unique place,” he proclaims. “There are very few places on the earth where there’s a fault that runs right by the city and could knock it all down at any point. It gives a different edge to things here,” waxes Whalen.

He continues unwaveringly, “When I’m in the Midwest – or even on the East Coast – I do feel that things are a little safer. There’s not the same energy coming out of the earth in that sense. It’s just a more stable place back there.”

This description of the Shjips home – or at least the discourse that’s utilized for it – plays on the notions that the rest of the nation may have of the Bay area and the people that call it home.

More importantly than cultural perspectives on music, San Francisco’s unique communities can alternately nurture creativity or stilt it as a result of ridiculous living coasts. Attempting to explain the intangible Whalen adds, “There’s a mystique about being from San Francisco that seems to help us.”

In Whalen’s use of the term “mystique,” he has at once defined San Francisco in ethereal terms, but again also explained the Wooden Shjips’ cultural import. They remain undefined. It might be that “mystique” that the band attributes to its relatively high profile for such a new act. The group, despite having released music over the last two years has as of yet to extensively tour the US.

“It’s nothing that any of us understand either.” Whalen begins. “Essentially, our first record came out last September and it seems that new people keep discovering it. There’s definitely a life to it that doesn’t come from us touring all the time.” If the band’s relative popularity has come mostly from its recorded efforts, it’s safe to assume that the Shjips hitting the road in the states will only help its cause.

“Right now,” reveals Whalen, “we’re in the process of trying to decide what we’re going to do next year. But we’d like to be doing a US tour.”

Exuding this hope to better explore the country in the coming months, Wood Shjips have finished recording a new treat for concert goers to pick up. “We’ve laid ‘em [the tracks] all down on tape. And right now Ripley and Dusty have been doing the mixing and getting ready to turn that in. So we’re hoping for February [to be the month of the record’s release].”

The Shjips, however, aren’t the only group to mine the fuzzy depths of this much loved genre. Two New York bands can claim a similar sound to that coming out of San Francisco. Both the Religious Knives as well as the Psychic Ills tout sounds that are in more than a few ways concurrent to the Shjips. There are obvious differences. But one similarity is that none of these groups seemingly have all that much a predilection for clearly enunciated lyrics. The Knives’ latest release, The Door (Ecstatic Peace, 2008), and the Ills’ last full length, Dins (Social Registry, 2006), seem instep with the Shjips predilection to focus on simple, pulsating rhythms accompanied by layers of distorted melody.

Some might be moved to proclaim a renaissance for this type of music, but not only would they be wrong, seeing as the stylistic flourishes have never completely receded from recorded music, but they would be missing the point. The four that make up the Shjips seem wholly unconcerned with comment from the outside. More so, the members seem enchanted by their fleeting chance to play music culled from their record collections. All the better, these sounds make the hips of the hippest concert goers shake like an earthquake – albeit a mild one that San Franciscans are accustomed to. That seems enough for right now. Maybe seeing the world fly by through the window of a van as they commence a fuller touring schedule will change their collective perspectives – but hopefully not.

Thursday Morning Bay Area Garage und Psych

There’s a shit ton of music all over the place and over priced NorCal isn’t any different. I’ve only had the pleasure of seeing the Gris Gris outta this crop of acts thus far – and it might be hard to beat that, but we’ll see. Ty Segall should be famous here in about five minutes though…

Dungen Live @ the Dublab (11.12.08)

An appearance late last year from Dungen just got thrown up over at the Dublab. It’s a bit short, but if you wanna hear more, you can surely hunt down one of their discs on the internuts.

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