Tuesday 08.02.11: KXLU presents WOODS / THE FRESH & ONLYS / WHITE FENCE @ Echoplex

8:30pm / $12 adv; $14 advance day of show; $15 at the door / 18+

Woods||Listen || Watch||MP3
With a title like At Echo Lake, the fifth album from New York’s Woods intimates a modern rock aesthetic fully informed by historical manifestations of teenage along with a concomitant feel for the specifics of time and place. The distance between 2007’s At Rear House and 2010’s At Echo Lake may at first seem only semantic but it more properly represents a move from a kind of informal back porch jam ethos to a fully-committed vision of the infinite possibilities of group playing.

Over the past few years Woods have established themselves as an anomaly in a world of freaks. They were an odd proposition even in the outré company of vocalist/guitarist/label owner Jeremy Earl’s Woodsist roster, perpetually out of time, committed to songsmanship in an age of noise, drone and improvisation, to extended soloing, oblique instrumentals and the usurping use of tapes and F/X in an age of dead-end singer-songwriters. Recent live shows have seen them best confuse the two, playing beautifully-constructed songs torn apart by fuzztone jams and odd electronics.

At Echo Lake feels like a diamond-sharp distillation of the turbulent power of their live shows, in much the same way that The Grateful Dead’s “Dark Star” single amplified and engulfed the planetary aspect of their improvised takes. Some of the material here – the opening “Blood Dries Darker”, the euphoric “Mornin’ Time” – is so lush that lesser brains would’ve succumbed to the appeal of strings and horns but At Echo Lake is more Fifth Dimension than Notorious Byrd Brothers, nowhere more so than on “From The Horn”, a track that is as beautiful in its assault on form as “Eight Miles High” or Swell Maps’ “Midget Submarines”. But despite the instrumental innovation that the album heralds – G. Lucas Cranes’ psychedelic tapework on “Suffering Season”, guest musician Matthew Valentine’s harmonica and modified banjo/sitar on “Time Fading Lines” – At Echo Lake is all about the vocals.

Woods’ secret weapon is the quality of Earl’s voice, osmosing the naive style of Jad Fair, Jonathan Richman and Neil Young while re-thinking it as a discipline and a tradition. Here he is singing at the peak of his powers, in a high soulful style that is bolstered by heavenly arrangements of backing vocals. At Echo Lake feels like the transmission point for teenage garage from the past to the future. Deformed by contemporary experiments, bolstered by magical traditions from the past, it’s the sound of now, right here, At Echo Lake.
-David Keenan/Glasgow/March 2010

FRESH & ONLYS || LISTEN || WATCH
When someone tells me an album has no bad songs, I get dubious– not about the claim, but about how ambitious a record that avoids failure could be. Well, there’s not a bad song on Play It Strange, and yet there’s ambition all over it. The Fresh & Onlys’ mix of Buddy Holly melody, Byrds twang, and beatific joy might seem conservatively retro, in line with the garage leanings of San Francisco comrades Thee Oh Sees, the Mantles, and Sonny & the Sunsets. But the band constantly stretches those parameters, whether in the sprawling, eight-minute “Tropical Island Suite”, the bombast of “Who Needs a Man”, or a deceptively dark opener ironically titled “Summer of Love”. So while it’s fair to call Play It Strange a non-stop hit parade, the Fresh & Onlys deserve just as much credit for shooting at tons of different targets.Pitchfork

White Fence||Listen
White Fence is the solo project of Tim Presley, who spent earlier years in the heart of the punk and hardcore scene playing with The Nerve Agents, but finds himself now in several 60s-inspired garage and psych bands, including The Strange Boys and Darker My Love. His solo project, White Fence, saw its first, self-titled release last April via Woodsist/Make A Mess, and and the follow-up …Is Growing Faith comes out January 18.The Bay Bridged