At the end of this eclectic selection of this year's record will stand the album I really played to death this year. Portland quartet Wooden Shjips released V shortly after my birthday in May and since then there were only a few weeks I didn't listen to this record. Some might say it is just West-Coast sound and they are not wrong at all. But how they play this kind of music is more than superb. I found the description of their sound somewhere in the internet:
The beauty of Wooden Shjips’ music is that it can just as easily fill or empty your head. Empty spaces are few and far between in their work; a sonographic representation of any of their songs would almost certainly be a near-solid hacksaw blade. But it also seems made for zoning out to: it’s not exactly background music, but it has a semi-ambient feel, a stoned and sleepy mood. V is just a little sharper than Wooden Shjips have sounded before, but there’s still something stopping the sun’s rays from hitting the ground as hard as they might. There’s smoke in the air here: it might be from wildfires, or it might just be from a joint.
Wooden Shjips - Eclipse
Wooden Shjips - Red Line
Wooden Shjips - Golden Flower
