Arthur proudly presents

Woodsist Festival L.A.
June 15, 2010
The Echo & Echoplex

enter at 1154 Glendale Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90026
6pm / $10 advance, $12 day of show / ALL AGES

featuring

REAL ESTATE

WOODS
(listen: “I Was Gone”, “Party in the Pines”)

KURT VILE
(listen: “Freeway in Mind”)

ABE VIGODA

THE ART MUSEUMS

THE MANTLES

NODZZZ

SUN ARAW

ALL SAINTS DAY
Gregg Foreman (Cat Power / Delta 72) and Katy Goodman (Vivian Girls)

THE BATHS

Purchase tickets for $10 here thru Ticketweb

Updates: woodsist.blogspot.com

---

More about WOODS and their new album, from David Keenan (The Wire, Volcanic Tongue):

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