Woods
Love Is Love

The Woods are a good pop band, but after more than ten years of releasing music, they inevitably pay the price not so much for a lack of inspiration, but for a lack of innovation in the sound of their productions, which have historically been based on very simple patterns that have always been their strength. This results in a certain fatigue that is shared between the band and their long-time listeners who have been following the Woods since the beginning and inevitably feel this sensation.

Probably from this perspective, then, it becomes somewhat difficult to critique this album. I mean, if their strength has always been the repetition of certain patterns and inevitably simple ones leaning towards a certain accessible psychedelic pop, asking them for something different would then seem pretentious. As if necessarily wanting to express a negative judgment on the band and their latest work. Moreover, the more experimental attempts are perhaps the less successful ones, and this is not coincidental because it evidently involves something that is not among the group's characteristics.

In practice, the fatigue heard in this latest album, 'Love Is Love' (released on Woodsist, the Brooklyn label founded by the same Jeremy Earl, vocalist and guitarist of the band), is evident and in some way the same as in the last two works and particularly of another album I would describe as 'irrelevant' like 'City Sun Eater in the River of Light' (2016).

How much of this decline was influenced by the departure of bassist Kevin Morby from the group in 2013 (who dedicated himself to a successful solo career), I don't know. My feeling is that this event in itself wasn't a decisive factor in this sense, and even while listening, I don't trace that attempt and those political contents that Jeremy Earl mentioned in the album presentation, which is said to be inspired by the contemporary historical and political phase of the United States of America.

The album opens with the title track 'Love Is Love', a pop-folk ballad in the band's style or that of Pink Mountaintops with references to the typical west coast atmospheres and the innovative use of horns. The composition itself is, as usual, very simple, but the result is somewhat particular, a kind of 'Morricone' pop mixed with Latin and worldbeat rhythms. In this regard, indeed, the song that closes the album, 'Love Is Love (Sun on Time), a kind of 'reprise' of the opening track, is even worse: it feels like listening to a sort of homage to '80s hits like 'Lambada' by the French group Keoma. The calypso sounds, especially in the use of guitars, at some point become excessive and make one miss what could have been more minimalist choices in the arrangements.

The rest of the album isn't any better.

'Bleeding Blue' is a folk ballad with barely hinted psychedelic nuances where the group resumes the use of Morricone-style horns already used in the opening track, culminating the song in certain triumphant atmospheres or at least cinematic thrilling ones like those of Sergio Leone's famous 'Dollars Trilogy.'

'Lost in a Crowd' is a pop-folk ballad that takes up certain psychedelic sounds of the '60s west coast; 'Spring Is in the Air' is an ambitious track over ten minutes long, instrumental only, where on a substrate of reverberated sonic diffusions, experiences of cinematic inspiration follow one another. Overall, it's not even that bad, but it certainly doesn't make one shout for a miracle; it's nothing particularly brilliant or innovative and is not enough in itself to save and give a complete sense to the album. In the end, it also lacks a certain 'cohesion.'

The last track would be 'Hit That Drum', which apparently has practically nothing to do with the rest of the album and forms a song with dramatic tones and references to certain typically 'Americana' sounds. A kind of gospel where ghosts echo and where the singing is in some way solemn and at the same time concise, like the recitation of a memorial.

There are too many things that do not convince in this work ultimately to consider it a good album. Maybe give it a listen, but you will hardly fall in love with it and will soon consign it to oblivion. Just as you will probably (rightly) give the group a new chance when they release their next album.