Woodsist

Kuross, Jens

Crooked Songs

Woodsist

"Who on earth is Jens Kuross?" He's been hiding in plain sight: a fumbled career as an LA session musician and songwriter, a cabinet maker in Idaho. Crooked Songs, his debut for Woodsist, is mysterious, warm, and heart-stirring. Using just voice and electric piano, the music delicately enswathed by ambient synth – minimal without losing sight of his songcraft Crooked Songs suggests an otherworldly naturalism akin to a ghost returning to earth to observe the passing of time, life, and light. A Note from Hayden Pedigo: "Back in December of 2023, after being on the road for a month opening for Devendra Banhart, I played a solo show in the basement of a Shriner lodge in Boise, Idaho. I’d never heard of Jens Kuross, a local act selected by the promoter to open the show. Before the show, we went to dinner together and he told me, 'I'm just gonna play my Wurlitzer and sing with some ambient synth stuff and see what happens.'" "An hour later, with everyone sitting on that basement floor, Jens began to play. In the first twenty seconds, my wife and I looked at each other like, 'Are you hearing what I’m hearing?' Jens played these beautiful, touching songs that sounded something like Arthur Russell-meets-Harry Nilsson. By the second song, I was in tears. It was the first live performance that ever made me cry. At the end of his set, I told my wife that it was the single best live performance I had...

Earl, Jeremy Bradley

Four Songs EP

Woodsist

***Jeremy Bradley Earl is a NY-based visual artist and musician in the psychedelic folk rock band Woods. This four song EP marks his first recorded music under his own name and coincides with his first solo tour outside of Woods. As a longtime champion and maker of psychedelic American music, Jeremy Earl knows how to play it wrong in order to get it so right. He’s spent twenty years on a space echo trail with his band Woods, and while he’s refined his craft, there’s still a gentle chaos inside. These four solo songs blend folk and rock like his band, but left alone his writing cuts a little deeper, the hallucinations homespun, the illuminations ghostly. Includes a cover of "Deep Water" by Ed Askew. Jeremy Bradley Earl (vocals, guitars, Casio, percussion, drums), Sam Cohen (guitar, bass, drums, mellotron), Kyle Forester (piano). Limited edition color risograph 7-inch pressed on black vinyl.

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...

St. Louis, Anna

In The Air

Woodsist

“Born of a thousand nights lost in a surrender to stillness and contemplation, In The Air is Anna St. Louis’ second full length album and her most considered work yet. “It’s an outlook on the world that was formed when her immediate one was small. The intervening years since her last album found St. Louis in a small one-bedroom cabin in the middle of the woods of upstate New York with a new love and time to think of what she wanted to express with her music. For weeks on end, the only trips she took were to and from her job as the front desk clerk at a nearby hotel. The previous years she had spent on tour and performing constantly in the venues of Los Angeles felt like they had occurred in another lifetime. “St. Louis describes the writing period as one of a slow harvest; a fertile time but one that required a newfound patience. Instead of documenting her first thoughts, she spent more time with each song, going deeper with the themes and ideas she wanted to express. “This slower approach also guided the sonic textures of the album. Working with producer Jarvis Taveniere (Purple Mountains, Woods) in two extended recording sessions in Los Angeles in 2021, St. Louis used the studio in a previously unexplored way, opening up her songs to more experimentation featuring brighter tones and a more orchestral sound to accompany her new perspective. To that end, she was...

Andrews, John & The Yawns

Love For The Underdog

Woodsist

John Andrews is something of an open secret in a certain corner of the music scene: a versatile musician and animator. A film school drop out whose work hat-tips tradition as much as outsider anti-aesthetics. He’s spent over a decade on the DIY circuit, playing early house shows alongside then up-and-coming peers Weyes Blood and Daniel Bachman. Today he is still out there projecting his sketchy hand-drawn animations during his performances in coffee shops, small galleries and non-traditional venues. Andrews’ painterly approach now introduces the listener to his version of New York City, the place he was bound to end up after years of dwelling in Pennsylvania farm towns and New Hampshire barns. There is handmade vibrancy to the world he’s imagined here: intimate moments seen from the interior, looking outward from hole-in-the-wall restaurants, theaters and the fragments of peace found within the restless and dirty street corners. Love For The Underdog, his aptly titled fourth release with the Woodsist label, was tracked live to tape in various studios and apartments across the Empire State with help from his bandmates in Cut Worms’ touring outfit, Max Clarke, Keven Lareau and Noah Bond. Buoyant melodies are supported by timeless string arrangements, translated from Andrews’ head to page with the help of friend Simon Hanes. The string quartet follows the tradition of Francoise Hardy, Harry Nilsson, Margo Guryan and Belle and Sebastian, giving the whole thing a cinematic ambience with stark shadows of an Edward Hopper painting. The lyrics tie together narratives...

Bobbie Lovesong

On The Wind

Woodsist

Bobbie Lovesong is the alias of American recording artist Madelyn Strutz. “On The Wind” is the debut full length from Bobbie, who produced, performed, recorded, and mixed the album herself in Taos, New Mexico. The album is a collection of psych-pop oddities and fizzy space age interpretations of jazz standards that are informed in equal parts by Larry Heard’s breezy dream sceneries, LSD blotted Americana and kaleidoscopic 60’s pop. Bobbie went to Taos, New Mexico in 2020 to live communally with a small group of musicians as the lockdown stretched on for months. Retreating into an unfinished Earthship, Bobbie passed the days writing and recording music, with nothing more than a laptop microphone and a few instruments. At once surreal, timeless and extraterrestrial, “On The Wind” can be heard as a hallucinatory sonic love letter to Taos.

Andrews, John & The Yawns

Cookbook

Woodsist

“John Andrews is picking flowers from each corner of his life and presenting you with an unusual bouquet. His imaginary band ‘The Yawns’ are back! Third time’s a charm. In hockey terms, they call it a ‘hat trick’ and you know who’s always wearing a ratty old hat? John Andrews. Three years in the making and we have Cookbook, the third, and most colorful record from your favorite New Hampshire based craftsman. “Unknowing folks usually assume he lives in New York City or Los Angeles but confer with John for five minutes and if he’s in the right mood he’ll talk your ear off about the granite state and the old, seedy colonial barn where he’s tracked his records with his weird and wonderful friends. “Take a listen to his previous effort, 2017’s Bad Posture. It was the grassroot slacker’s pie in the sky. His head was stuck in the past. He probably excessively listened to ‘Cripple Creek Ferry’ and he most likely wasn’t keeping up with household chores. Time moves on, but just look at him now! All grown up yet likely still feeling those growing pains. After a few more years of traveling we now have Cookbook, fresh out the oven…phew! About nine or ten new tracks, but who’s really counting? “The lyrics are simple and endearing, inspired by mid-century love songs. His inspirations are all across the board. If his subconscious was a bootleg taper, life would be the show. “At any rate, it doesn’t sound like...

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.

Painted Shrines

(colored) Heaven And Holy

Woodsist

***CHECK STOCK!!!  Received a 7.5 rating from Pitchfork.  Jeremy Earl (Woods) and Glenn Donaldson (Skygreen Leopards, The Reds, Pinks & Purples) met sometime in the mid-oughts and bonded over a love of tambourines and DIY sounds. They shared many stages since, and their first serious collaboration was on the 2011 Woods album Sun & Shade. Around 2018, Earl was restless in upstate NY and accepted an invite to record in Donaldson’s studio in an undisclosed rural coastal town in Northern California. In a week they emerged with nearly an album’s worth of hazy folk-rock and psych-pop with touches of more outré lo-fi noise. Jeff Moller (The Papercuts) added bass, and they put the finishing touches on during quarantine. Heaven And Holy ebbs and flows like coastal fog between songs and dreamy instrumentals, splitting the difference between The Clean’s Unknown Country and The Byrds Fifth Dimension.

Painted Shrines

Heaven And Holy

Woodsist

***CHECK STOCK!!!  Received a 7.5 rating from Pitchfork. Jeremy Earl (Woods) and Glenn Donaldson (Skygreen Leopards, The Reds, Pinks & Purples) met sometime in the mid-oughts and bonded over a love of tambourines and DIY sounds. They shared many stages since, and their first serious collaboration was on the 2011 Woods album Sun & Shade. Around 2018, Earl was restless in upstate NY and accepted an invite to record in Donaldson’s studio in an undisclosed rural coastal town in Northern California. In a week they emerged with nearly an album’s worth of hazy folk-rock and psych-pop with touches of more outré lo-fi noise. Jeff Moller (The Papercuts) added bass, and they put the finishing touches on during quarantine. Heaven And Holy ebbs and flows like coastal fog between songs and dreamy instrumentals, splitting the difference between The Clean’s Unknown Country and The Byrds Fifth Dimension.

Woods

(colored) 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 in Stinson...

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...

Hurt Valley

Glacial Pace

Woodsist

"LA-based musician Brian Collins records music as Hurt Valley. He makes loosely psychedelic, often rollicking songs that feel like they came from a simpler time, before you realize that the simpler time you’re thinking about never really existed in the first place, and you’re just romanticizing a past that was as complicated as the present. "All this is to say that Collins makes songs that sound like they’re ripped from a forgotten private press record from decades gone but imbued with the weight of right now. Glacial Pace opener 'Geology Dreamer' is anthemic and sad, an end-of-the-night (or, let’s face it, end of the world) jam that crumbles under lyrics about love and (healthy) obsession and getting through shit with people you love and trust. "The last track on the album, 'Immaterial Worlds' acts as a mirror image to the opener. Where 'Geology Dreamer' hits hard and woozy, 'Immaterial Worlds' is soft and intricate, a nakedly contemplative end to an album that sneaks up on you no matter where you might be when you hear it."Listening to Glacial Pace will no doubt evoke a number of complicated feelings about how you could be living differently, or more simply. The songs here are something of a roadmap to understanding how we got where we are, and what it all means. It doesn’t so much give answers as it does is point us toward observations that might push us to question who we are and what we do. Is there a better...

St. Louis, Anna

If Only There Was A River

Woodsist

***CHECK STOCK!!!  Received a 7.5 rating from Pitchfork.  If Only There Was A River is the first full-length studio album from Anna St. Louis. The songwriter, who originally hails from Kansas City, began writing songs after moving to Los Angeles five years ago and has previously released a cassette of recordings on Woodsist / Mare Records, appropriately titled First Songs. The tape received notice from NPR: All Songs Considered, Pitchfork, and Stereogum.On her proper debut, St. Louis spreads her wings and expands on the promise hinted at on First Songs. To achieve that end, she enlisted Kyle Thomas (King Tuff) and Kevin Morby to produce the album, which was engineered by Thomas in his home in Mount Washington, LA. The collection of eleven songs also features Justin Sullivan (Night Shop) on drums and multi-instrumentalist Oliver Hill (Pavo Pavo). While hints of influences like Loretta Lynn, John Fahey and Townes Van Zandt peek out of the corners of the songs, this album is not a nostalgic affair. Rather it marks the emergence of an artist fully coming into their own.“Being from the Midwest means a certain tone is woven into ones’ fabric. And every now and then, someone comes along who has the power to convey that feeling in their cadence alone. And so all hail Anna St Louis, who lets us into her world of heartache, wonder and a never-ending, never-beginning dance with time. Her album is for the mystics, reminding us that the world is full...

Bonny Doon

Longwave

Woodsist

***BACK IN PRINT ON NEW RED VINYL!!!  Arriving in the early months of 2017, Bonny Doon’s self-titled debut was a warm introduction to the band for many. Hazy and bright, the album’s woozy melodies and swirling webs of summery guitar textures were easily ingested as low-key slacker pop. But the nonchalant breeziness belied a serious attention to songcraft, and hinted at depths yet unexplored. Lo and behold, before the ink was even dry on the first record, work had already begun on its follow-up Longwave, a conscious about-face from the sonic experimentation of the first album, and a journey inward. In the spring of 2016 the band decamped to a remote part of Michigan, nesting near the evocatively named Mystic Lake, and spent a week uprooting former approaches and reinventing their sound anew. Moving into more improvisational territory, they wrote quickly and from the hip, using repetitive chord structures to aid in spontaneous generation. Attracted to the session’s spacious arrangements and unaffected sounds, they immediately went into the studio to capture the material. Working for the first time outside of home recording settings with engineer Bill Skibbe and longtime friend and collaborator Shelley Salant, the experience allowed for a focused concentration on bringing the intrinsic spirit of the group to the surface. Opting for spontaneity and simplicity over the exploration of layers and textures that defined the first record, the band architected an incredibly intimate sound for these new songs. The album was tracked with minimal overdubs or...

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...

Andrews, John & The Yawns

Bad Posture

Woodsist

***BACK IN PRINT ON NEW GREEN VINYL!!! Note price change. Throughout years of traveling, John Andrews has documented his life with his home recordings. His first record, Bit By The Fang, found him living in the amish country of Lancaster, PA. On his latest record, Bad Posture, he waves farewell to Pennsylvania and greets the wooded hills of Barrington, NH. These songs were written slowly and quietly throughout the winter, usually late at night next to the wood stove. It was recorded in Andrews’ barn with the doors ajar, welcoming the springtime — inviting the outside noises in. You can hear the crickets chirping and the occasional truck driving by. The songs themselves lend their hand like slow backwoods Beatles demos covered in a thin blanket of tape hiss. Andrews’ band, The Yawns, has been crystallized with staples from the New England freak scene: Rachel Neveu and Lukas Goudreault (MMOSS / Soft Eyes) and Joey Schneider. The album was mixed with headphones at the foot of Emma Critchett’s grave, who lived in the Yawns’ house during the 1800s. The record is an ode to her and all who have lived there. It paints a picture of living in the “freecountry” on the precipice of a rapidly changing political climate.

Hand Habits

Wildly Idle (humble Before The Void)

Woodsist

***CHECK STOCK!!! Received a 7.6 rating from Pitchfork. “Singer, songwriter and guitarist from Upstate New York Meg Duffy, aka Hand Habits, has been putting in her time on the road and in the studio over the past two years with Pacific Northwest band Mega Bog, and the Kevin Morby Band, making an impression on everyone she comes across with her natural charisma and uncharted talent as a multiinstrumentalist. But let Wildly Idle (Humble Before The Void) be her open invitation to the world to step inside and take a much deeper look into who Duffy actually is. “Tracked in an Upstate New York living room, then finished in her current home in Los Angeles, this album was recorded by Meg herself; she has an acute ear for detail, has touched every corner, has seen every vision ’til its end. Because of this, Wildly Idle feels incredibly intimate, like a secret between her and the listener. It hits soft, like warm water all around you, a bath, and before you know it Meg’s whisper has made its way inside you. Meg has music in her touch, and this, like many bedroom-debuts (Microphones, Jessica Pratt, Little Wings, Grouper) is only the beginning. But let us not look to the future now, and instead stand alongside her, our trust in her will, both humble before the void, with her first chorus as the mission statement: Hold you like a flower, hold you like an hour glass.” —Kevin Morby

Mv & Ee

Root / Void

Woodsist

***BACK IN STOCK - LAST COPIES!!! Received a 7.3 rating from Pitchfork. “MV & EE take their homespun hypnotics and cosmic country sounds to new levels on Root / Void. I love this album— it trips hard and hauntingly—a gift for languid golden afternoons or late night moonlight powwows. Anthem-worthy tape edits on some cuts crack open surreal and cinematic vistas. While joined by fellow travelers here and there, this album remains in essence a fecund duet from two entwined souls, updating and re-defining their unique pool of sound. Intrepid audio bathers: get thee immersed!” —Lee Ranaldo, Italy, July 2016

Bookstaber, Rafi

Late Summer

Woodsist

“We’d like to welcome back our old friend Rafi Bookstaber. It’s all good…the immediate thing I felt when I jammed his Late Summer for the first time was wanting to hug life, cosmic love in the underground. “This is a diff kind of human digitata, it’s sweet analog. You dig spring reverb, then maybe flesh it with sum Ra-fi. Pure jam. Extended solos and explorations go from downtown woodland discord and eternal reverie to Relatively Clean Rivers and beat earth poetics. Pretty darlin’ indeed... “What a vapor trail of music; very groovy to see folks finally catching up to this head. Dawn of a new vibration out of his occult pedigree in so many spaced out earth objects (Death Chants / Aswara / Von Himmel / Mendocino). Bookstaber also logged golden hours with Time-Lag and that deep scene. The beginning of an ear and golden spirit juice. Mined private press vision with his own Azriel and Humito imprints, shucked handmades—there’s also his groove and howl with the wolfpack in the MV / EE axis. Oxide, preserves and records…Rafi hummed the music of maidens. Iron Maiden this is not, shipbuilding it sails, four sail and many years ago I was there, so was Rafi’s fi. You dig, apache? Find some wampum, blow a journey, be here now for Late Summer eternal…” —Matt “MV” Valentine

Woods / Ultimate Painting

Tour Single

Woodsist

Woods and Ultimate Painting team up for a limited edition 7-inch to celebrate their 2016 tour. A co-release with Trouble In Mind Records, the single is limited to 1,000 copies and features an exclusive unreleased track from each band. http://www.groundcontroltouring.com/tours/woods

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

Nugent, Cian

Night Fiction

Woodsist

***CHECK STOCK!!! Received a 7.3 rating from Pitchfork. Night Fiction is Cian Nugent’s third proper album but his first taking on the role of singer-songwriter. Where his previous two (2013’s Born With The Caul and 2011’s Doubles) explore extended guitar-based instrumentals with his band, The Cosmos, here he reigns things in and focuses his songwriting skills. Guitar fans, do not fear—there is still plenty of soloing and fingerpicking here. Comprised of both solo and full-band material, Night Fiction amalgamates everything Nugent has done up to this point and reveals a more broad palate of influences, including The Velvet Underground, Richard Thompson, Television, Neil Young, John Lennon, Fred Neil, etc.  Put to tape over a week beginning on Valentine’s Day 2014, Night Fiction was recorded in Bow Lane Studios in Dublin with Daniel Fox (Girl Band) and mixed by Brendan Jenkinson. The album’s seven songs include solo ventures as well as full-band recordings featuring David Lacey on drums, Conor Lumsden on bass, Brendan Jenkinson on organ and piano and Ailbhe Nic Oireachtaigh on viola. The vibe here is familiar yet refreshing and a logical progression for Nugent.  “I’ve always been impressed and inspired by Cian’s guitar playing; now on this album he brings his voice and stories to only expand that brilliance.” —Steve Gunn

Woolen Men

Temporary Monument

Woodsist

“Our hometown has been buried under an avalanche of condos and pointless businesses catering to the newly rich. Noise complaints shut down our shows and pull the plug on countless DIY venues. The places where we lived are being torn down; the rent keeps climbing up. Born too soon or too late; the recession’s effect on our youth was as invisible as it it was profound.  “Music today is rendered powerless—white noise made in the echo chamber, for the great Smooth Face that gazes once and moves on. So here it comes, some noise from the dustbin. The internet is a sham: Temporary Monument, we made it for ourselves. Look us in the eyes and tell us you’re not getting old.” —Woolen Men  Portland Ore. 2015

Herbcraft

Wot Oz

Woodsist

Across four LPs, Herbcraft’s trajectory has taken the form of an open-ended and perpetual trip, covering ground from the pining bedroom odes of Agartha to the psychedelic living room services of Ashram, to the full-band barn hoots of 2013’s The Astral Body Electric. On its fourth album, Wot Oz, the band undergoes another bold reinvention, shifting its locale to the Traummaschine A/B warehouse, where Matt Lajoie met with drummer Aaron Neveu and bassist / organist Joe Lindsey for the trio’s first-ever rehearsal in July 2013. The practice was intended simply as a warm-up for a live gig, but surveillance tape began rolling almost immediately, as the group’s chemistry imbued both abstract sound experiments and primitive rock- and blues-based numbers with the same heady waft of freewheeling possibility.  The needle touches down on a slice of this initial meeting: “Fit Ür-Head” lands at the feral, pummeling nexus of proto- and post-punk; a live-to-tape two-chord gob of lung-tar spat inches from a flea market snakeskin, while voices howl and wah guitar razes every inch of green. From this auspicious birth the album moves through the afterhours narco-haze of “Au’s Nation” to the Zamrock-inspired groove of “Push Thru the Veil,” with Neveu rolling off an endless stream of future-classic break-beats throughout. On the flip, “No More Doors” finds a sunbaked cassette of tabla-and-bass loops melting as the band abandons Earth for hallucinogenic oblivion, and the album’s closing 12-bar blues deconsecration “Bread Don’t Rise” spins a circular framework into a sweaty Fillmore dancefloor-filler...

Little Wings

Explains

Woodsist

***BACK IN PRINT ON 'TRANSPARENT TEAL' VINYL!!!  “Kyle Field, professionally known as Little Wings, is a living legend. He is the modern embodiment of the traveling bard and the singing troubadour. Kyle’s discography is vast and impressive, full of tunes plucked from the lexicon of great American songwriting. On his latest effort, Explains, he crafts melodies so haunting and familiar, it’s as if he’s not composing them at all. He is tapping into something greater, acting as a vessel for the collective unconscious that is folk music. This is an album that is immediately accessible and also unfolds slowly, revealing greater depth with each listen. Kyle’s lyrics are direct yet poetic, funny yet sad. Explains is a fantastic record that celebrates the enduring spirit of a great artist. Its release on Woodsist is all too fitting—a label whose very foundation seems based on lasting creative integrity.” —Alex Bleeker

Andrews, John & The Yawns

Bit By The Fang

Woodsist

“Bit by the Fang is the first solo album from singer / songwriter John Andrews and his imaginary backup band The Yawns. Andrews began recording the album in 2013 while working at a Salvation Army in the Amish country of Lancaster, PA, his home at the time. As the new year rolled around, he followed a demanding schedule of writing, recording and touring with both Quilt (drums) and Woods (keys). It wasn’t until a well-earned break that he found the time and energy to complete the solo record he started months before. He recounts the difficulties involved: ‘Traveling so much caused my whole living scenario in PA to kind of fall apart,’ he tells, lamenting over the comfort only home can provide. As he moved back to his hometown of Yardville, NJ, he set up camp in his grandparents’ empty living room to record and perform everything entirely by himself once again.  “Warm acoustic guitars, honky-tonk piano, lap steel, singing saw and fluttering violins all sing together on this well crafted, yet comfortingly sloppy, psych-country / R&B record. A self-taught piano player, Andrews maneuvers with the precision of a player well beyond his years. Lyrically and stylistically he tackles the subject of death with the lightheartedness of a Saturday morning cartoon in ‘”I’ll Go to Your Funeral (If You Go to Mine).’ It’s hard not to conjure comparisons to Michael Hurley, Daniel Johnston or Kevin Ayers. This album is a great introduction to the grandiose fables of characters at...

Joyner, Simon

Grass, Branch & Bone

Woodsist

*** Available on vinyl again - note cheaper price!! Renowned American singer-songwriter Simon Joyner first came to prominence during the lo-fi movement of the early ’90s alongside contemporaries like Will Oldham, Peter Jefferies, the Mountain Goats, Smog and Alastair Galbraith. Joyner was championed early on by the late British DJ John Peel, who famously played Joyner’s 1994 LP, The Cowardly Traveller Pays His Toll, start to finish on one of his BBC programs, making Joyner more well known overseas than in his own country. Considered a forefather of the Omaha music scene, he’s released critically acclaimed albums on various independent labels every few years for over two decades. He keeps a low profile and tours only occasionally, spending most of his time working and raising a family, allowing writing and music to remain an artistic outlet rather than an occupation. Grass, Branch & Bone is Joyner’s thirteenth proper album and a sonic departure from 2012’s Ghosts. While that record was a double-disc collection of dark, dissonant songs confronting death and loss in the vein of Neil Young’s Tonight’s the Night, this new one is sparse by comparison, running with the likes of other singer-songwriter outcast aftermath albums like Dylan’s John Wesley Harding, Gene Clark’s White Light, David Blue’s Stories, Jerry Jeff Walker’s Five Years Gone, Townes Van Zandt’s Our Mother the Mountain and Cohen’s Recent Songs. It’s a natural progression—after a funeral, one takes stock and reflect upon his or her own life. Grass, Branch & Bone...

Morby, Kevin

Still Life

Woodsist

***BACK IN STOCK!!! Received a 7.9 rating from Pitchfork. Still Life is the second solo album from Kevin Morby. The namesake of the record is an art piece by Maynard Monrow entitled “Still Life with the Rejects from the Land of Misfit Toys.”  The album’s title has several meanings. On the surface, it refers to Morby’s change in lifestyle that came with moving to Los Angeles from New York in August of 2013. But he also admits that the title is ironic. The songs from Still Life were written during yet another period of tour and travel for Morby, as he spent almost all of 2013 on the road with Woods (with whom Morby parted ways amicably last year), The Babies (who are currently on hiatus) and as a solo artist.  The album reflects both this time in transit and the quiet confines of his new home in Montecito Heights. Scenes of performers, audience expectations and the paradoxical confines of a roving individual perpetually caught in a crowd percolate the songs, notably in “The Jester, The Tramp & The Acrobat,” and “Parade.” (Morby calls the latter an elegy of sorts for one of his major influences, Lou Reed.) Violent fates, wrestling with destiny and the nature of death creep into songs like “The Ballad of Arlo Jones,” “Bloodsucker” and “Amen.” Even Morby’s more obvious love songs like “All of My Life,” “Drowning” and “Our Moon” are highly bittersweet; the characters seem to never quite find each other,...

Kivel, Matt

Days Of Being Wild

Woodsist

***CHECK STOCK!!! Received a 7.6 rating from Pitchfork. Days of Being Wild was recorded over the course of six weeks in the summer of 2013 with Paul Oldham in a small detached shed in Los Angeles. The album art features original drawings by Max Markowitz.  “I had worked with Paul on the last record I did, 2013’s Double Exposure, and I was lucky because he decided to move to LA right after that record was finished. My friend Brian Cosgrove has this house in the Echo Park hills, kind of a punk house where everyone who lives in it plays in bands. It’s got a front porch with a refrigerator on it and it’s got a one room shed in the back where bands rehearse. A lot of bands have rehearsed there over the years. Paul and I started meeting there over the summer and I would buy Paul beer. We drank whiskey on the first day, but I think we both got too drunk to do anything productive—well, at least I did, Paul’s from Kentucky, so he has an even higher threshold—so we switched to beer and things went smoothly from then on. I played most of the instruments, Paul played bass, and my friend David Kitz joined in on drums for two of the harder songs. Paul told me some great stories about all of the musicians he’s worked with over the years. He even told me the secret to I See a Darkness—Bunny Wailer’s ‘Blackheart Man.’...

Skygreen Leopards

Family Crimes

Woodsist

***CHECK STOCK!!! Received a 7.2 rating from Pitchfork. The Skygreen Leopards’ latest outing continues the group’s tradition of skewed sunshine pop with lyrics focused on the bummer side of the eternal rock ’n’ roll summer. Donovan Quinn (New Bums) and Glenn Donaldson sing and strum tales of real and imaginary companions, delivering impressionistic rants about losing love, getting high or feeling uncomfortable. They record and mix straight off a nice tape machine run by Jason Quever of Papercuts (who also plays in the band sometimes, along with Jasmyn Wong and Nick Marcantonio) and resist the temptation to use digital erasers, preferring to leave in the mistakes and rough edges.  For those who have followed Skygreen Leopards since the psych CDR boom, came on board after their gnarled country opus Disciples of California, or are a newcomers to the Skygreen’s jangling world, Family Crimes is the perfect expression of their patented brand of blemished pop.

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

Morby, Kevin

Harlem River

Woodsist

***Received a 7.0 rating from Pitchfork.  Title track featured in Volvo commercial.  Harlem River marks the solo debut of songwriter Kevin Morby. Known for his work as the singer / guitarist for Brooklyn band The Babies and bassist for Woods, the Kansas City native and new Los Angeles resident calls the record “an homage to New York City,” his adopted home for the past five years. Harlem River features eight interweaving tales of tragedy and misfortune from a series of desperate characters playing out their dramas with the city as backdrop. A departure from some of the signature sounds of his better known projects, Morby’s solo material glistens with a haunting intimacy. He maintains that the songs are about other people, but it’s hard not to feel a piece of him in each one—a half-imagined, half-painfully personal world of lost love, addiction, violence and prayers for the departed. The album was recorded in Los Angeles in February and March of 2013 with producer Rob Barbato, who recorded The Babies’ second album Our House on the Hill and whose guitar and bass work figure prominently on Harlem River. It also features drummer Justin Sullivan (The Babies) as well as contributions from Will Canzoneri, Tim Presley (White Fence), Dan Iead and Cate Le Bon.

Rado, Jonathan

Law And Order

Woodsist

Jonathan Rado is a songwriter, a staid performer, an evangelical producer; the 23-year-old California native’s solo project, fashioned on brief sabbatical from his main project, Foxygen, is a deliciously self-conscious piece of esoteric apocrypha. Like character games, or symphonies of nonsense imitation-language, his records are cathartic, designed only to liberate the body and break the awkwardness of obsessive, existential silence. Alone in a bedroom, the holy land where he’s been experimenting with recording since junior high, Rado laughs nervously and eats his fingernails, awestruck by the sublimity of the aural world. The smallness of his own anemic voice confounds the babe agape, and only by adopting the task of genre does he transcend his own limitations to stand comfortably at the precipice of sound. On his debut solo album Law and Order, the San Fernando Valley and the Lower East Side flirt over muddy coffee, get married over corned beef, and give birth to a Motown drum beat—but something is amiss. For example, there is no bass line on LA-psychedelic-dance-jam “Seven Horses,” and not a single hand clap satisfies the droning singer’s gently repetitive request, “If you feel it all, clap your hands.” “Hand in Mine” sounds like an idea Johnny Cash had while sleepwalking through a fever dream. The zonked-out guitarist settles back to warm Christmas sleep but dreams only of synthesizers. “Looking 4a Girl Like U” is an opium den, and there in the running shower Prince stands, sultry. He kaleidoscopically unbuttons his soaked, sequined shirt for six...

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.

Bleeker, Alex & The Freaks

How Far Away

Woodsist

“New Jersey-born Alex Bleeker is an old soul. For his sophomore album, How Far Away, he lets that come into play fully. Over eleven tracks, he deals with the autumnal phase of lost love, the point after the grieving subsides and you start figuring out what you’re supposed to do next. As with his last album, Bleeker cobbles together a ragtag collection of ‘freaks,’ including Mountain Man’s Amelia Meath, who provides gorgeously weighty backing vocals on four tracks, Woods’ Jarvis Tanviere, Real Estate’s Jackson Pollis, Big Troubles’ Sam Franklin, among plenty other like-minded musicians who lend sparkling instrumental flourishes and a full-bodied backbone to Bleeker’s pained yowl. “Album opener ‘Don’t Look Down’ feels like a mission statement for the rest of the record. Over upbeat guitar jangle and smooth organ runs, Bleeker’s voice cracks and lilts: ‘Don’t look back on the way we met / Don’t look back at me now / Don’t retract all the things you’ve said / Don’t back out on me.’ In the hands of plenty other songwriters, this would come off as self-pitying, but Bleeker just seems wise. “The key to How Far Away isn’t just Bleeker’s lyrics, which [are] both universal and intensely specific, but also the relaxed dynamics of the players. Bleeker is a jam band fanatic, and he takes the core ethos of The Grateful Dead—let things unfold naturally—and distills it into concise pop songs: tracks like ‘All My Songs’ and ‘Rhythm Shakers’ are brief, but they shift from crystalline guitar to...

Woolen Men

S/t

Woodsist

The Woolen Men are three—two Oregon natives and a Washingtonian. They play punk-influenced DIY music in the Pacific Northwest tradition of Dead Moon and The Wipers. More than a sound or style, that means a kind of work ethic—do-it-yourself and do it a lot. The band is happiest touring up and down the I-5 or bunkered in their practice space with the cassette 4-track rolling. And it shows. Live, The Woolen Men are thunderous and energetic and the trio’s magnetic chemistry shines through in the recordings. Their debut LP, released by Woodsist Records, follows a handful of largely self-released EPs. Instead of straying from their fast-and-loose recording technique to capture the live energy of their sound, they simply recorded and recorded and recorded until they had enough songs to make up an album comprised only of material with that elusive spark. The ten tracks here represent five different sessions, and as many songs made the cut as were left behind. The LP was made to endure, with little attention paid to current trends or “in” sounds—what matters is that the songs are well written and executed with integrity. The whole thing was recorded to analog tape. The Woolen Men are Alex Geddes, Lawton Browning and Raf Spielman. They live and work in Portland, OR. Spielman previously released an album of solo material under his Polyps moniker for the Woodsist sister label Hello Sunshine.