Wooden Shjips – Dos

The Wooden Shjips' manifesto is a simple one - to make fuzzed up improvisational psych rock, fuzzed up improvisational psych rock you can dance to. And to keep it simple, Dos is about as perfect a rendering of that ambition as you could hope for. It's fuzzed up improvisational psych rock that you can bloody well dance to. Is that clear?I should also make clear that Dos is one hell of a record - a great slab of locked-in groove and weight, all enveloped in a fuggy narcotic haze. It reeks of the San Francisco or of the London UFO club of '68, it channels that hourless psychedelic miasma and gives it a thundering bottom end, which might be motorik, but in fact is more elephantine than that, more primitive. The premise is simple (as if it hasn't already been said): the rhythm section of Dusty Jermier on bass and drummer Omar Ahsanuddin find a groove, staple themselves to it and leave the floor open for some monumental leads from Ripley Johnson's guitars, and the more understated layered organs of Nash Whalen. Johnson tops all this off with a pulsing whisper that comes at you from some other age. This happens five times on the record, rinse and repeat - but by christ does it work.I've been listening to the first Shjips album again (for the curious, the band are named after a song written by David Crosby and Stephen Stills - to which they added a j, obviously) and that record, despite having similar leanings is gripped by a peculiar torpor, a kind of lassitude - as if the band were searching for a way out of a post-stoned fug. Well, Dos is most definitely that road out; and it's almost as if they took that Velvets/Stooges soaked template and wound it up - literally. Aside from the obvious increase in tempo, the sound is fuller, fatter and is now almost totally devoid of any sense of bagginess or excess. It's a ball.'Motorbike', the opening track, might just be as clearer statement of intent as ever graced a record: it begins with a sharp wail of feedback which bleeds into a fuzzed up riff before the rhythm section lock into a groove, with Jermier's bass sounding like an oak tree bending in the wind. Johnson's vocals, such as they are, seep in through the bottom of the hum, appearing briefly before disappearing again, the soup of the sound closing over the hole. 'Down By The Sea'Â - a 10-minute pig-nosed lurch - is a refined version of this, if such a thing were possible. The most rudimentary of rhythms is assumed and as the track builds Johnson solos with increasing spiralling intensity. This is The Grateful Dead wired to the mains...'Fallin'' is the album's standout track though - the premise is the same but the track does actually feel looser, brighter. This is partly due to Nash Whalen's gorgeous farfisa organ tone, but there is something nearly Springsteen-esque about Johnson's delivery here too. It's also the album's most obvious nod to Klaus Dinger - a constant presence but here a defining influence.It's hard not to like Dos, and it has that ability - primarily because of its insistent rhythms - to stay with you long after its finished. I sometimes suspect that in some dusty hall the band are still chugging, chugging... 78%Wooden Shjips on MySpace