Artist: Woodlands
Title: Woodlands
Genre: Indie Pop / Rock
Release Date: 26th April 2013
Label: Ingrid / Sony
Album Review
On the one hand Sweden seems to be a geographic and telluric node relating to catchy music that brims over with melodies and harmonies, on the other it´s a place, which is blessed with nativeness and vast, with landscape varied and untouched from the urban blemish. Forests, rivers, mountains... I´m sure you know the sequence.
And for it´s the nature of the beast that art is always influenced by its setting, it is no surprise that Woodland´s self-titled debut sounds the way it sounds. Besides the indicating band name, the Stockholm-based trio´s music is ensouled with recollection, atmospherically and musically. Far from HiFi, technical bells and whistles and a disrooting production the ten songs seem relieved from the stiff brace of sound, reduced to a pure, acoustic essence. But don´t get me wrong – it´s not that kind of soft-footed, unburdened hippie folk the album is offering, no, it´s more an a-temporal translation of asperity and gentleness, of motion and poise with simple but effective means, a perceptible reversion to the musical language. (I want to avoid the term “Retro” here, because it always sounds so dusty!)
Armed with a basic guitar-bass-drum constellation (and some additional keyboards), it´s the fathoming of all given possibilities that makes the tracks sound so diversely although using the same vocabulary. Sometimes the guitars tweet and purl, sometimes they creak and revolt, the drums are decent and polite ever and anon, untamed and vigorous in the next moment. And the bass is skilfully juggling with rhythm and melody, an organic motion from the delicate buds to the ossified roots. But the main colour is Sara Wilson´s voice that feels like a homelike setting for the different seasons the songs create. With its clearness and shiny timbre it´s a brilliant contrast to the fuzzy guitars, a celestial alignment that guides you on your way through the musical nature´s waywardness.
After a few listening sessions it´s hard to name any special songs, because they feel related and entwined on one side and unique and self-paced on the other, just like words within a sentence and so I pick those, which stuck in my mind after the first run like the rocking and shaking ‘Lazy Days’ (whose stumping riff and volleys of piano remind me of some of the early seventies Bowie stuff) and the beautiful ‘Dark Clouds’ with its jazzy tenderness, which sounds like a missing track from Badalamenti´s ‘Twin Peaks’ soundtrack. Or the stirring ‘Housebuilding’, that dresses one of the most complicated and complex emotions in simple but splendidly vivid and apposite words, the cloudlike ‘On the Run’, whose subtle sadness floods through your veins like a pouring summer rain and finally the clay-coloured ‘Kids’, what comes along with a pure Stoner Rock attitude, distorted and somehow full of gravity, contrary to the hovering vocals of Ms Wilson.
Summa summarum: ‘Woodlands’ is a great but strangely difficult piece of work, too varied and colourful for fitting in one special mood. It is too ponderously for casual listening, too complex and profound for filling dance floors and too adhesively for straying thoughts. The best is to put on your earphones, take a stroll through the nearest forest and enjoy both simultaneously – the manifold beauty of the music inside and that of nature around…
Tracklist
01. Move Forward
02. I Wanna Know
03. Lazy Days
04. Dark Clouds
05. Housebuilding
06. River Running Wild
07. Cheap Cigarettes
08. On The Run
09. Kids
10. Make It Through
Line-up
Sara Wilson – Vocals, Guitar
iklas Korssell – Drums
Marcus Holmberg – Bass
Website
http://www.woodlands.nu/
Cover Picture
Rating
Music: 8
Sound: 7
Total: 7.5 / 10
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