Woods - With Light and with Love

Woods
With Light and with Love
14 April 2014
Woodsist

2.5 stars out of 5

 

I’ve always exercised caution when Pitchfork raves on and on about a band from NYC. A lot of the time the praise is disproportionate to the music (The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Vivian Girls), though, admittedly, they get it right once in a while too (okay, fine, basically everyone else). For me, Woods have always been in the former category. Mind you, I have a trigger response to any hipster who picks up a banjo, so often I don’t give these bands the time they might deserve. While Woods aren’t banjo oriented, they do indeed harken back to a folk tradition, albeit one that involved plenty of LSD and peaked in San Francisco in the late 1960s.

With Light and with Love doesn’t do anything to move them from that former category into the latter. Its George Harrison licks sit very inoffensively overtop its copy of a copy of what psychedelic folk is supposed to sound like. There’s so much following of formula here that one suspects Woods have a computer program that spits out guitar tabs and vocal melodies based on some sort of lowest common denominator algorithm for musicians without imagination. Even the nine-minute title track is so contrived and unoriginal that you wish you could give a good slap to both the members of the band and the Pitchfork writers who keep promoting this stuff as somehow relevant to the world of music.

In a way, I appreciate having to listen to records like this multiple times, because then I get to use more cuss words and say nasty shit. In addition, it’s provided me with an opportunity to diss Pitchfork, which is always fun. So, to the members of Woods, I must say thank you, thank you for granting me this gift. Now please be so kind as to break up and stop making music.

reviewed by Richard Krueger