With Light and with Love
As Jeremy Earl has added members to his once-solo project Woods, they\'ve more than lived up to the hype (such as *Pitchfork*’s \"Best New Music\" claim for 2009’s *Songs of Shame*). Woods have become a surprisingly prolific group—and one that\'s slowly embraced higher-fidelity productions. Earl sings in an eerie high pitch that lands somewhere between Neil Young and Prince. The playing on the title track may suggest a trip through the psychedelic rock of the ‘60s and the ragged stoner jams of the ‘70s, yet there’s also a dense, modern tone to what\'s also a current-day raga *and* pop song. Driving the keyboards to distortion while letting the drummer loose happens even on the more modest songs. “Shepherd” settles on country-rock. “Moving to the Left” trips back to *Magical Mystery Tour*–era Beatles. A mellow early-\'70s tune like “New Light” is warped by its extreme production tone. “Full Moon” could be a lost track by the ‘70s band America. “Only the Lonely” (not the Roy Orbison song) sneaks in the album’s strongest melody just before the finish.
"Woods’ brand of pop shamanism has undergone several gradual transformations over their past few albums, but on With Light And With Love, the tinkering reveals an expanded sonic palette that includes singing saw, heavier emphasis on percussion, and a saloon piano that sounds like it was rescued from a flooded basement. Distinct from both the stoned volk of their earliest recordings and the Kraut-y dalliances of more recent fare, With Light And With Love showcases a more sophisticated brand of contemporary drug music that owes more to Magical Mystery Tour than motorik. If you’ve ever thought of Woods as a pop group comprised of weirdos, or a weirdo band that happens to excel at playing pop songs almost in spite of itself, With Light And With Love provides a corrective in the form of songs that show these two elements as natural, inextricable bedfellows. Throughout the album, vocals are frequently emitted through Leslie speakers and guitars perform one-string ragas like Sandy Bull reared on shoegaze and skate videos. With Light And With Love is an album of deeply psychedelic, deeply satisfying songs for a new age of searchers, of Don Juan and Animal Chin alike." - James Toth
When Woods released 2012’s Bend Beyond, they’d released five proper LPs in as many years, all just about equally good. The result of a relatively lengthy two-year process, their new album With Light and With Love might not be a bold reinvention, but there's an unmistakable focus and determination that can serve as a proper substitute for overt, bar-raising ambition.
On Brooklyn’s Woods’ seventh album in nine years, they continue on their ever-evolving psych-folk trajectory.
Woods once again prove that they can casually strike the perfect balance between imaginative pop confections and untethered psychedelic jams.
With Light and With Love finds Woods mining the trippiest corners of their trademark psych-folk sound.
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While many ‘alternative’ bands make a habit of becoming more esoteric as they age, Woods have taken the other route. The first Woods record At Rear House was a hauntingly strange and ethereal record, pared back to bare bones, singer Jeremy Earl’s voice coming across like a ghost.
Brooklyn lo-fi roots rockers Woods have released five albums in the last six years, not to mention numerous splits and seven-inches, all of them good.
The eighth album from stoner folk quartet Woods, With Light and With Love is their first recorded in a professional studio. Next to the digitized, future-slicked sounds of other latter-day psych totems such as Lonerism or Merriweather Post Pavilion, it fe
[xrr rating=3.5/5]Woods’ 2011 album Sun and Shade offered truth in advertising, tempering their bright folk sound with hazy if not truly dark psychedelia.