Woods have close ties with Brooklyn. Since 2006 singer Jeremy Earl’s Woodsist label has released records by Vivian Girls, Crystal Stilts, Ducktails and Real Estate, while multi-instrumentalist Jeff Taveniere’s Rear House recording studio, opened in 2007 and located in a two-storey East Williamsburg tenement, has become a local landmark for aspiring musicians in the borough. The band they’re in are unlikely to garner nods of recognition outside of Brooklyn, but they seem to have toured and collaborated with a lot of artists who would.

Yet little of the band’s sound reflects the borough or the city’s history. True, up to this point this sound has been resolutely lo-fi, but only to capture a spontaneous energy – maybe a spiritual vibe – that’s more concerned with improvisation and “letting it happen” as opposed to an unapologetic amateurism or grimy punk ethic. Their role as outsiders to the city is made more evident by the bucolic psych-rock mood of theirs, a style that resides in spirit somewhere closer to California than Coney Island; accordingly, the Woodsist label’s annual festival made the permanent move from Brooklyn to Big Sur, California a couple of years back.

But rather than just being sun-baked surf hippies, the band are hardworking. Bend Beyond stands as their sixth full-length record in as many years and shows as many signs of gentle evolution as the records that precede it. Jeremy Earl still sings in the same strangled, Neil Young-type tenor, and the band still whips up the same knotty squall of twangy guitars, but Bend Beyond is a trim, comparatively economical record that builds on the blueprint of 2010’s At Echo Lake (though that blueprint was subsequently ignored in last year’s Sun and Shade). Interviewed by Pitchfork, guitarist Jarvis Taveniere touched on the band’s approaches to recording the album. “The record will be as powerful as a show”, he mused revelatorily before outlining that Bend Beyond was unique in that they thought out its recording. ” not to record a song immediately, and instead say, ‘We’re going to wait’” – a process unremarkable to most bands but one that Woods found “mind-blowing”.

On the record this mundane revelation has the effect of helping solve the familiar problem of Woods records feeling like launching pads or rough content for their live show. Though not radically different, Bend Beyond feels like the first Woods record content to be just that – a record. The title track is framed by a brief coda on either side of a winding guitar solo, but instead of a meandering 6 or 7 minute improvisation it’s abridged into a palatable 3 minutes, happy to just give a sense of where it might’ve gone rather than making it explicit. Lead single ‘Cali in a Cup’ refines the band’s increasingly predilection toward writing actual sunshine pop songs with things like verses, choruses, harmonies and not too much static fuzz, while ‘It Ain’t Easy’ offers a clean simplicity in pushing Earl’s vocal front and centre over a fingerpicked guitar.

Elsewhere the formal refinement encourages a bigger, more ornate sound. On ‘Size Meets the Sound’ the band attempt a Tame Impala-style grandiosity with fuzzed-out lysergic guitar and flowing drum fills that sounds like it was recorded on a precarious cliff-edge overlooking a Tolkienesque landscape rather than the band’s cluttered Bushwick Avenue base. While on the other end of the scale, ‘Back to the Stone’ ornaments its wintry melancholy with a spectral vocal and strings buried deep in the background.

While nothing revolutionary, Bend Beyond performs the neat trick of maintaining the band’s shambling, campfire vibe whilst embracing slicker production techniques and tighter song structures. Whether the band will continue to embrace the marvels of the studio isn’t entirely clear. Asked in the same interview whether they would ever record in an actual studio, outside of Rear House, Taveniere replied “Why should we go to a studio when they have stuff I’ve already spent a lot of money on?”. It’s an answer that reflects the band’s unfussy conservatism, another thing that makes them stand out in Brooklyn’s relentless buzz-cycle. But when they produce good albums like this one on a yearly basis, who can blame them for being reluctant to change?

Listen to Bend Beyond