The Hippies are back and they’re Punks

Artist: Wooden Shjips
Album: Vol. 2

Artist: Gary War
Album: New Raytheonport

We live in marvellous times, musically speaking. Never before has the music of our era or those which predated it been so readily accessible and available for all to hear. The internet has enabled not only the free sharing of rarities and oddities, but it has also created a marketplace for small distributors and labels, an organising tool for DIY promoters and a valuable outlet for aspiring bands. Essentially, the internet has done what both the hippies and the punks dreamed of: it has provided an online global community, capable of disseminating information and providing reference in a virtual instant. Thus, there should be little surprise that the past decade has been characterised by the wish to look backwards; to summarise what came before. Rarely has the notion of influence been so prominent in our conception of musical progression than it has been now. And it’s through these glasses that we see two very different, but markedly similar, examples of pyschedelic crate digging: Wooden Shjips Vol 2. and Gary War’s New Raytheonport.

Vol 2 is the ‘Shjips fourth release proper, and their second compilation of rarities. To say that they represent the cutting-edge of retro rock music wouldn’t be the contradiction it appears to be: neither expressively forward-looking nor out-and-out rip-off merchants, they’re planted firmly in the centre. Yet despite their status as the latest glut of San Francisco freaks, it’s not a case of flower power and breathy harmonies; they’re looking to the dark side of the moon, preferring heavy, driving motorik beats to fuel their blend of minimalism and extended jams. As such, it’s strange to think that Vol 2., an odds and sods collection if there ever was one, sounds a lot like their most realised piece of work: from the bent out of shape guitar jam of ‘Start To Dreaming’, to the breathy dub wobble of ‘Contact’, there’s a swagger and a notably sustained quality to this collection which is somehow missing from their regular releases.

Gary War is an altogether more unique prospect than the San Franciscans, more representative of recent progressive psychedelic Californian tendencies. Which is why it’s all the more surprising he calls Brooklyn his home, rather than some debris-strewn surfer beach on the West Coast. War takes the shiny surfpop of the Beach Boys and shoves it head first into a blender strewn with intergalactic litter, via way of the hum and hiss of lo-fi. His songs are generally sparse, echoey affairs, mixing synth washes with dead eyed vocals and drooping comedown basslines. There’s few better examples on latest LP New Raytheonport than the spaced out melancholia of ‘Please Don’t Die’, which sees War intone “Please don’t die / because I’ll die” in his best impression of an acid-damaged Brian Wilson over what sounds like a broken drum machine. Listening to War, it’s hard not to feel that he’s obsessed with the nature of the future as it once was, his ghostly synths pointing to some imagined utopia that never was to be.

Naturally, the Shjips are no strangers to revivalism either, yet like War, their secret is in making the past sound fresh. Even their cover of Neil Young’s ‘Vampire Blues’ has a prescient nature to it: Ole Shakey’s classic attack on the oil men (“I’m a vampire baby, sell you twenty barrels worth”) having lost none of its resonance over the past few years. And perhaps that’s the best summary of Wooden Shjips: their aim is to exhume the past and prove its relevance in the modern age, dragging the dated kicking and screaming into the new era. A similar theory can be applied to War: New Raytheonport can’t be written off as another jaded expedition back into the vaults of Eighties kitsch: it’s far too smart for that, as tracks like the gibbering garage rock of ‘Healthy Living’ prove. Listening to Gary War is like imagining the future, only from the perspective of an inhabitant of the Eighties: a clankingly hyperreal and dystopian experience. In some senses War’s sophomore LP represents the reverse of Vol 2: instead of dragging influences forward, it almost seems to suck the future back into the past.

And on that note, it’s hard to feel that War was really content with what the future turned out to be like, just as the Shjips have set sail toward their idealised utopia of easy riders, space cadets and beatniks. The crux of both these albums is a sense of marked disappointment at how things actually turned out: each is tinged with hints of that cruel comedown. These pair of hippies have more in common with the punks: whether in their DIY ethos, or in the disaffected tones of their own take on shattered and fragmented pyschedelia, they’re merging two apparently disparate traditions. Buy the records, take the ride.