Bend Beyond
It\'s a pleasant surprise when a new release by a band well into its career reveals some evolution and its earlier, solid releases suddenly glisten with the charm of dewy-eyed, inchoate newness. *Bend Beyond* takes the sweet, earthy sounds of New York\'s Woods (formerly from Brooklyn, now based upstate) into another realm of psych-tinged indie-folk, one that feels less unsure and hazy and more wizened and playful. Woods propel classic sounds into the new millennium with surety, nodding unabashedly to \'60s Neil Young on the breezy, harmonica-accented \"Cali in a Cup\" and showing echoes of \"Cowgirl in the Sand\" on the title track. \"Is It Honest?\" is as jangly as anything The Byrds ever recorded (and vocalist Jeremy Earl even sounds like Roger McGuinn here), with sparkling guitars riding atop waves of vintage organ and glinting tambourines. With winsome pop gems like \"Impossible Sky,\" full-on psych-rock barn-burners like \"Cascade\" and \"Size Meets the Sound,\" and gentle, ghostly creations like \"Something Surreal,\" *Bend Beyond* is Woods\' finest offering yet.
"For their seventh album, Bend Beyond, Woods got dark. It’s not that they weren’t dark before—when you really get in there and listen, Jeremy Earl is singing about some heavy stuff, but it’s hidden under his gorgeous falsetto and sometimes obtuse lyrics. On Bend Beyond, though, Earl and company fully embrace that darkness. Album opener “Bend Beyond,” has long been a jammy live staple, but here it’s compact and tight with a stuttered guitar line and a world-ending collision of instruments. Meanwhile “Is It Honest” jangles along happily until you notice Earl is in a more destructive zone than the bright music initially suggests, singing It’s so fucking hard to see as both a form of comfort and an act of despair. Instrumentally, Bend Beyond is certainly the most full Woods record yet, guitars weave and bubble across peppy drumming, but lyrically Earl is at his most direct and spare. While previous albums sounded like they went directly from Earl’s brain to tape with minimal outside interference, Bend Beyond is lush and full-bodied, the work of a band in perfect, heavy harmony. Listening to the record as a whole, it feels like the most daring leap Woods has made yet: It captures the band’s live intensity, but keeps the intimate sadness that made them so great in the first place."- Sam Hockley-Smith
The Brooklyn band's seventh album features more disciplined songwriting, and the production offers more clarity and variety than ever before. While 2011's Sun and Shade exhibited Woods' jammy side amid the usual folk-pop gems, Bend Beyond is all pop, all the time.
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The fact that Woods has released seven albums in the last seven years isn't the most remarkable thing about the Brooklyn folk band's recording output.
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With Bend Beyond, Woods continue to try and convince us they're not in California. Brooklyn, they say.
[xrr rating=3.0/5]For their fifth full length and seventh overall release in as many years, New York’s Woods left behind a few familiar comforts.
In the first shots of the music video for Bend Beyond’s “Cali in a Cup,” a gemstone kaleidoscopes rays of light onto a hand and into the camera’s lens as the band delivers an opening image: “Sundays, as leaves fall on the snow,” all while walled in by a row of surfboards. Harmony, and perhaps