Wooden Shjips
Dos
(Holy Mountain)

The world can be divided into two groups: those who love repetition in music and those who loathe it. Of course, repetition appears in a lot of music, but there's repetition and then there's REPETITION (REPETITION REPETITION). You know what I mean?

The latter sort typically is found in minimalist, drone-based music and many styles of dance music. Rock has had its share of repetition lovers: The Velvet Underground sprang out of the minimalist concepts of long-form droners La Monte Young and Tony Conrad, via John Cale; the Fall's Mark E. Smith titled a song "Repetition," which became that post-punk group's manifesto; space rockers Hawkwind and disciples like Loop discovered the trance-inducing properties of repetition and then festooned their epic tunes with loads of electronic effects.

It's the last-mentioned lineage from which San Francisco's Wooden Shjips draw. What they do is technically rudimentary. But the key to this sort of rock is locating those primal riffs that sound amazing no matter how many times they repeat. That part is difficult and requires intense thought. From there, it's a matter of how you embellish those riffs—which effects you use, what instruments augment them, which hallucinogens you take, etc.

On Dos (it's their second album—and it's like drugs, dude), Wooden Shjips continue the fuzzed-out, serpentine riff-mongering that they executed so well on their self-titled debut and the singles comp Vol. 1. Mantric reiterations abound, of course, resulting in songs that inspire both rapid motorin' and quality copulation (theoretically). If anything's changed, it's that there's a more vertical than horizontal thrust on these five new tracks than with past output, with an emphasis on churning, head-bobbing bass-drum interplay. Nash Whalen's keyboard is allowed greater latitude to arc, pulsate, and drone, too. Guitarist Ripley Johnson's voice remains almost an afterthought, an Alan Vega-on-ludes mutter.

So Dos doesn't radically deviate from previous Wooden Shjips releases, and that's okay. They could probably build a long career on the weird-beard festival circuit grinding out extended jams like this till their facial hair is as long as La Monte Young's. recommended