Woods

Woods

Perennial

Woodsist

***AVAILABLE ON LIMITED WHITE VINYL!!! “Woods are in bloom again, inviting you to disappear into a new spectrum of colors and sounds and dreams on Perennial. “Formed in Brooklyn in 2004, Woods have matured into a true independent institution, above and below the root, reliably emerging every few years with new music that grows towards the latest sky. Operating the Woodsist label since 2006 and curating the beloved homespun Woodsist Festival for the musical universe they’ve built, Perennial is the sound of a band on the edge of their 20th anniversary and still finding bold new ways to sound like (and challenge) themselves. “Perennial grew from a bed of guitar / keyboard / drum loops by Woods head-in-chief Jeremy Earl, a form of winter night meditation that evolved into an unexplored mode of collaborative songwriting. With Earl’s starting points, he and bandmates Jarvis Taveniere and John Andrews convened, first at Earl’s house in New York, then at Panoramic House studio in Stinson Beach, California, site of sessions for 2020’s Strange To Explain. With a view of the sparkling Pacific and tape rolling, they began to build, jamming over the loops, switching instruments, and developing a few dozen building blocks. “The album’s resulting eleven songs, four of them instrumental, are in the classic Woods mode—shimmering, familiar, fractionally unsettling—but with the half-invisible infinity boxes of Earl’s loops burbling beneath each like a mysterious underground source. From source to seed to bloom, each loop unfolds into something unpredictable, from the jeweled...

Woods

(Color) Reflections Vol. 1 (Bumble Bee Crown King)

Woodsist

With no touring in 2020, and possibly this year, Woods decided to take a deep dive into their archives and put together the first volume of their much discussed archival series, Reflections. Featuring rare and unreleased recordings from 2009 - 2013, including a ghost town desert jam off the side of the highway, their first live performance in Big Sur, the first recorded version of “Bend Beyond” and some shelved diamonds in the rough that were finished up during quarantine. Their hope is that it plays like a “lost record” from an extremely strange and fruitful period in Woods history.

Woods

Reflections Vol. 1 (Bumble Bee Crown King)

Woodsist

With no touring in 2020, and possibly this year, Woods decided to take a deep dive into their archives and put together the first volume of their much discussed archival series, Reflections. Featuring rare and unreleased recordings from 2009 - 2013, including a ghost town desert jam off the side of the highway, their first live performance in Big Sur, the first recorded version of “Bend Beyond” and some shelved diamonds in the rough that were finished up during quarantine. Their hope is that it plays like a “lost record” from an extremely strange and fruitful period in Woods history.

Woods

Live At Third Man Records

Third Man

***There are certain bands in this supersaturated, hyper-fragmented, temperamental internet era that rise above ephemeral popularity because they deserve it. Woods is one of those bands, and their wheelhouse is a decidedly mellow blend of "campfire folk," psych, soul, and funk that's wise beyond its years in timbre and lyric and takes influence from many a surprising source. Woods brings songs into the world that are at once comforting and challenging, and the band's members take their job as music makers seriously, pumping out nine full-length studio records in the past 10 years and running their own label Woodsist out of Brooklyn. The journey we all took with Woods at the helm on May 2nd, 2016 has been immortalized now as part of Third Man Records' Live LP series, and it's a journey we highly recommend taking in the comfort of your own home — with a glass of your favorite beverage in hand, fire roaring, and mind malleable.

Woods

Strange To Explain

Woodsist

“Dreaming doesn’t come easy these shadowed days, which is why Strange To Explain by Woods is such a welcome turning of new colors. It presents an extended moment of sweet reflection for the 15-year-old band, bouncing back to earth as something hopeful and weird and resolute. Like everything else they’ve recorded, it sounds exactly like themselves, but with subtly different shades and breaths and rhythmic feels and everything else that changes, the natural march of time and the intentional decisions of the musicians moving in what feels like an uncommonly organic alignment. “Strange To Explain trades in a different kind of dependability, maintaining a steady connection to the voice on the other side of the record needle. After quickly recording and releasing 2017’s Love Is Love in response to the tumultuous events of their (and our) 2016, Jeremy Earl and company took their time with what came next. Parenthood arrived, as did a short songwriting pause. The band went bicoastal when Jarvis Taveniere headed west. And when they returned to their posts, there on the other side of this particular mirror, they made this, an album that not only catches and holds and shares the light in yet another new way, but recognizes that there’s still light to be caught, which is also no small thing. “A bend beyond the last bend beyond, Woods keep on changing, thoughtfully and beautifully. The colors were always there, like trees blossoming just slightly differently each season, a synesthetic message coded in slow-motion. Recorded...

Woods

Love Is Love

Woodsist

"Wisdom comes with age, so it’s no surprise that Woods have grown more sage in the twelve years since they formed, expanding from sylvan drum circles into increasingly elaborate, transcendent psychedelia."- Pitchfork "We walked down streets and crammed onto trains, our faces masks of fear. Unsure how to react, we, collectively, did not react. We grieved for a country and an ideal we never thought would die. We grieved for a loss of certainty.  We argued about what we thought would happen. We preached understanding. We advocated for anger. Some people said that we’d at least get some incredible art, other people said that was a small view of a world we were quickly realizing we’d misunderstood. Everyone was right. Everyone was wrong. Art made in precarious times matters as much as we let it matter.  But what are we looking for from the art we enjoy? Escapism? A reckoning with harsh reality? A temporary shared hallucination? Music can heal because it presents the pain of being human as universal.   Love is Love was written and recorded in the two months immediately following the election, but it’s not a record borne entirely of angry, knee-jerk reaction to what America is becoming. Instead, it’s a meditation on love, and on what life means now. Taking cues from last year’s City Sun Eater in the River of Light, it feels very much like a record made from living, shoulder to shoulder, in a major city: weaving psychedelic swirls of...

Woods

Know Your Minute

Woodsist

New exclusive Woods track recorded during the City Sun Eater sessions. 

Woods

City Sun Eater In The River Of Light

Woodsist

CHECK STOCK!!! Received a 7.6 rating from Pitchfork. “Woods have always been experts at distilling life epiphanies into compact chunks of psychedelic folk that exists just outside of any sort of tangible time or place. Maybe those epiphanies were buried under cassette manipulation or drum-and-drone freakouts, or maybe they were cloaked in Jeremy Earl’s lilting falsetto, but over the course of an impressive eight albums, Woods refined and drilled down their sound into City Sun Eater in the River of Light, their ninth LP and second recorded in a proper studio.  “It’s a dense record of rippling guitar, lush horns and seductive, bustling anxiety about the state of the world. It’s still the Woods you recognize, only now they’re dabbling in zonked-out Ethiopian jazz, pulling influence from the low-key simmer of Brown Rice, and tapping into the weird dichotomy of making a home in a claustrophobic city that feels full of possibility even as it closes in on you. City Sun Eater in the River of Light is concise, powerful, anxious—barreling headlong into an uncertain, constantly shifting new world.” —Sam Hockley-Smith

Woods

Tambourine Light / Tomorrow's Only Yesterday

Woodsist

Companion piece to their new full length, With Light and With Love, this single offers two exclusive tracks recorded summer 2013 in Brooklyn and Warwick, NY. More light, more love.

Woods

With Light And With Love

Woodsist

CHECK STOCK!!! Received a 7.9 rating from Pitchfork. “Woods’ brand of pop shamanism has undergone several gradual transformations over their past few albums, but on With Light and With Love, the tinkering reveals an expanded sonic palette that includes singing saw, heavier emphasis on percussion, and a saloon piano that sounds like it was rescued from a flooded basement. Distinct from both the stoned volk of their earliest recordings and the kraut-y dalliances of more recent fare, With Light and With Love showcases a more sophisticated brand of contemporary drug music that owes more to Magical Mystery Tour than motorik.  “If you’ve ever thought of Woods as a pop group comprised of weirdos, or a weirdo band that happens to excel at playing pop songs almost in spite of itself, With Light and With Love provides a corrective in the form of songs that show these two elements as natural, inextricable bedfellows. Throughout the album, vocals are frequently emitted through Leslie speakers and guitars perform one-string ragas like Sandy Bull reared on shoegaze and skate videos. With Light and With Love is an album of deeply psychedelic, deeply satisfying songs for a new age of searchers, of Don Juan and Animal Chin alike.” —James Toth

Woods

Be All, Be Easy

Woodsist

The recording of these songs serves as a farewell to Rear House, Woods’ home, recording studio, creative refuge and beloved shithole for ten long years.  “God’s Children” is a classic Kinks tune from the soundtrack to the 1971 British film Percy; “Be All, Be Easy,” originally from 2011’s Sun and Shade, was rerecorded to capture the live form that’s taken shape since its original release. Both are the first to feature new drummer, Aaron Neveu.

Woods

Bend Beyond

Woodsist

***CHECK STOCK!!! Received an 8.1 rating from Pitchfork. “For their seventh album, Bend Beyond, Woods got dark. It’s not that they weren’t dark before—when you really get in there and listen, Jeremy Earl is singing about some heavy stuff, but it’s hidden under his gorgeous falsetto and sometimes obtuse lyrics. On Bend Beyond, though, Earl and company fully embrace that darkness. “Album opener ‘Bend Beyond’ has long been a jammy live staple, but here it’s compact and tight with a stuttered guitar line and a world-ending collision of instruments. Meanwhile ‘Is It Honest’ jangles along happily until you notice Earl is in a more destructive zone than the bright music initially suggests, singing ‘It’s so fucking hard to see’ as both a form of comfort and an act of despair. “Instrumentally, Bend Beyond is certainly the most full Woods record yet; guitars weave and bubble across peppy drumming, but lyrically Earl is at his most direct and spare. While previous albums sounded like they went directly from Earl’s brain to tape with minimal outside interference, Bend Beyond is lush and full-bodied, the work of a band in perfect, heavy harmony. Listening to the record as a whole, it feels like the most daring leap Woods has made yet: It captures the band’s live intensity, but keeps the intimate sadness that made them so great in the first place.”—Sam Hockley-Smith

Woods

Cali In A Cup

Woodsist

Woodsist presents Woods’ latest single in anticipation of their upcoming full-length Bend Beyond due out this Fall. The 7-inches features a non-album B-side and is limited to 1,000 copies.

Woods

Find Them Empty

Woodsist

"As a companion piece to their new full length, Sun and Shade, this single was recorded in the winter of 2011 at Buttermilk Falls in Warwick, NY. Woods have gracefully risen to the top of their class by crafting intricate nostalgic, experimental pop songs that are unforgettable. A-side, Find Them Empty is far less falsetto and way more Bob Trimble than any of their previous work. B-side, Be There is a more jam-friendly number reminiscent of their legendary live shows. Woods will be touring the US all summer and have a UK tour planned for September.  The cover of this single features a young Caleb Braaten, his father, and a gigantic marijuana plant. Enjoy!"- Sacred Bones

Woods

Sun And Shade

Woodsist

***Received a 7.9 rating from Pitchfork. “Woods is a two-headed dog asleep on the porch and a butterfly on the windowsill... a Janus, a Gemini and a screen door. The sun won’t fade and the earworms will not leave, but the jams go on too long for the girl in the back who wonders if her friends are at another bar. Still, the ballads always make her cry. Woods is up there relaying the Woods-feel: Folk-rock, fuzz, tambourines, tapes and raw lunch pulled straight from the yard. Pop songs and other things: Sun and Shade.” —Glenn Donaldson   “Loose, shuffling and tuneful, the abridged Woods experience sounds more like Wowee Zowee than Workingman’s Dead, but it hits just the right contradictory note of tight arrangements and breathing-room playing to get that back-porch, weird America vibe.” —Pitchfork

Woods

At Echo Lake

Woodsist

***RECEIVED AN 8.0 RATING FROM PITCHFORK!!! "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 has established themselves as an anomaly in a world of freaks. They were an odd proposition even in the outre 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 as beautiful in its assault on form as "Eight Miles High" or Swell Maps' "Midget Submarines." But despite...

Woods

I Was Gone

Woodsist

***"Guess this new WOODS EP is a more unconscious approach to the written song. A side is a 3-part tape collage/head scratcher called ‘Days Gone By.' B side features new easy breezy psych rock single, 'I Was Gone' and the drugged out tribal child, 'Hang On.' Its crunchy. Take with some honey slides"—Tattoo Marty. One-time-only pressing of 1,500 copies. 

Woods

Songs Of Shame

Shrimper

The fourth full-length by Woods, Songs of Shame, veers away from the lo-fi guerillas-in-the-mist sound of their previous Shrimper long-player, At Rear House, and presents both 90-second and ten-minute forays into skeletal psychedelia. The idiosyncratic songwriting style and vocalizing of Jeremy Earl is still present in spades on the album.   Woods have toured incessantly as a trio over the last 12 months, and the songs on Shame have had their mettle tested. Check out the straight-ahead pop of "To Clean" or the "Neil Jung" push/pull of "Rain On." Elsewhere, an expansive side of the band hinted at on their Woods Family Creeps LP finds full flight on the subtle ten-minute stretch "September With Pete" (that features Peter Nolan of Magik Markers guesting).  "Utterly lovely music--a huge recommendation." --Boomkat   "Every song is mesmerizing. At Rear House is the rarest of records--one that is forceful without being forced and delicate without being too precious. Folk or indie fans should not miss At Rear House." --Popmatters   "Long time since I heard a collection of songs this maximal, with arcs of impossible-to-forget harmonies that rank up there with Siltbreeze-era Guided By Voices all rendered in a beautiful tape-hiss style that will have you cracking out your old Majora and Flying Nun LPs for a back-to-back spin.... [I]t's the songs you'll keep coming back to, some of the best murk-informed combinations of words and music this side of the invention of loop pedals." --David Keenan, Volcanic Tongue

Woods

Songs Of Shame

Woodsist

***BACK IN STOCK!!! The fourth full-length by WOODS, Songs of Shame, veers away from the lo-fi guerillas-in-the-mist sound of their previous Shrimper long-player, At Rear House, and presents both 90-second and ten-minute forays into skeletal psychedelia. The idiosyncratic songwriting style and vocalizing of JEREMY EARL is still present in spades on the album. Woods have toured incessantly as a trio over the last 12 months, and the songs on Shame have had their mettle tested. Check out the straight-ahead pop of "To Clean" or the "Neil Jung" push/pull of "Rain On." Elsewhere, an expansive side of the band hinted at on their Woods Family Creeps LP finds full flight on the subtle ten-minute stretch "September With Pete" (that features Peter Nolan of Magik Markers guesting). CD released by Shrimper.

Woods

How To Survive In + In The Woods

Shrimper

The Woods’ 2005 debut, initially issued as a double-cassette on the Fuckittapes label, was recorded in two bedrooms with no intention of being shared with the outside world. How To Survive In / In The Woods finds the Woods family at their most stripped-down and primitive. Thirteen cuts of home-cooked measles and grout gingerly pulled out of the spleen of a tape deck are now reissued on the popular LP and CD formats. The Woods are in the midst of touring and recording a follow-up long player due out next year. Check out their almost fully baked humble beginnings on this much sought-after reissue.  “...a combination of campfire folk and strange assembly techniques that should make mouth-breathers everywhere tingle with desire. Indeed, there is much to like about the way these guys play by the numbers, then fall apart and reassemble themselves in different guises. Gotta say, the new folk reaction to noise is pretty damn dandy.” —Byron Coley, The Wire

Woods

At Rear House

Shrimper

***Woods began in the woods, at the foot of Bear Mountain. In the earliest days it was a collaborative improvisational group with two core members and several guests, known as "woodsists." Shortly thereafter, Jeremy Earl and Christian DeRoeck emerged from the woods, dusted themselves off, and began to walk upright. The two woodsists immersed themselves in human culture, learned to craft a melody, to wield a tambourine, to construct a crude phonograph from spare bicycle parts. They learned the value of a cassette. Earl and DeRoeck returned to the woods and shared their newfound knowledge with the other woodsists. At Rear House is the result, songs and improvisations by outsiders, inspired by the human experience.