By Joel Francis
Wooden Shjips – Back to Land
The moment the needle drops on Back to Land, the third album from the San Francisco psychedelic group Wooden Shjips, a trace amount of smoke seeps from the speakers. By the time the title song is going full bore the sweet smoke is now unmistakably filling the room. Short of stopping the record, nothing can be done to stop the foggy ambience. It’s best just to lay back and embrace the feeling.
It doesn’t take long for the four-piece band to lay down a groove wide enough to accommodate an aircraft carrier. Once there, an organ spars with Ripley Johnson’s echo-laden vocals against a tight, minimalist rhythm section while Johnson’s guitar soars high in the heavens. There isn’t necessarily a lot of deviation from song to song, but why play with a perfect formula? Listeners will figure out pretty quickly if Wooden Shjips are their cup of tea. If so, welcome to the promised land.
Pretenders – Hate for Sale
Every so often, if music fans are lucky, a veteran artist will put out an album that reminds fans why and how they fell in love with the band in the first place. Hate for Sale, the 11th album from the Pretenders, is that album.
Clocking in at a brisk 30 minutes, Hate for Sale snarls out of the gate with and rarely slows down. Frontwoman Chrissie Hynde seems invigorated by the return of founding drummer Martin Chambers and guitarist James Walbourne, with whom she wrote every song. Walbourne’s riffs and solos add muscle to Hynde’s undiminished vocals. He even manages to singlehandedly salvage the album’s least-effective track (“Junkie Walk”). Sidesteps into reggae on “Lightning Man” and orchestral pop on the introspective ballad “You Can’t Hurt a Fool” reinforce the raw force on the rest of the album.
The Pretenders are selling hate. Buy it. There is a lot to love.
Fiona Apple – Fetch the Bolt Cutters
When this Fiona Apple’s fifth album was released digitally last April, and dealing with the coronavirus appeared to be a season and not A Thing We’d Have to Live with Indefinitely, I was convinced it was going to be the soundtrack for the pandemic.
Although this naiveté is laughable in hindsight, Fetch the Bolt Cutters still captures that mood. It is charming, angry, insecure, elegant, awkward and funny – often effortlessly shuffling through several emotions within a few bars.
Apple recorded these songs at her home studio in the years following her previous album, eight years ago. The resulting baker’s dozen tunes are complex and authentic and provide a heartening catharsis especially needed right now.
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