Woods - Love Is Love

The Guardian 80

(Woodsist)

Woods’ latest album was written and recorded in response to the US election. At first, its loose elegance seems as inappropriate as a waltz around the slaughterhouse, but gradually these six songs accumulate power from their stubbornly sunny defiance. Jeremy Earl’s songwriting is as strong as on last year’s City Sun Eater in the River of Light, and his psychedelic folk-pop band manage to sound forward-looking. Baleful horns add notes of horror to the wide-eyed optimism, particularly during the elegiac detour of Spring Is in the Air. By the time of the final reprise, there’s urgency to the mantra “say that love is love”.

Drowned In Sound 70

It's been almost a decade now since frontman Jeremy Earl and multi-instrumentalist Jarvis Taveniere turned their criminally underrated post-punk band Meneguar into Woods - they did release a couple of records under both names for a while, but it was clear from Meneguar's final album The In Hour on their recently formed Woodsist Records, where their heads were at musically as they significantly 'mellowed out'. The prolific band have released a record almost every year in that time, with Love is Love being their tenth overall. It is fair to say then they have firmly established themselves as a key psychedelic-folk band at this stage, but this is perhaps their first as a direct response to current affairs.

Love is Love was recorded shortly after last year's election, and repeatedly asks the question "How can we continue to love when there is so much hate surrounding us?" After two terms of relative optimism, 'the fear' that has been bubbling underneath has truly exploded, and here Earl explores that feeling of chaos and confusion over his five singing performances. 'Lost in a Crowd' for instance feels especially Highway 61-era Bob Dylan for a modern audience returning folk music to the idea of being a "protest music". Meanwhile, 'Spring is in the Air', a nine-minute psych-jazz instrumental epic, sounds like the bad dream Earl's narrator opines - "A descending darkness/and it feels like a dream/but the trip gets worse/and I'm lost in a crowd." - in the previous song.

These two tracks anchor this fairly brief 32-minute, six-track album, turning the ironically optimistic sound of the opening two tracks into a collective descent into a fever-dream of terrifying proportions. 'I Hit That Drum' for instance feels like it is left in suspended animation given its lack of the instrument referenced in the song title, holding a transcendent tension over the listener. Afterwards, closer 'Love is Love (Sun on Time)' reprises the theme and melody from the record's opener of the same name, ending on a more optimistic note as the phrase "say love is love" becomes a statement rather than a question.

The only major problem with Love is Love is that it feels relatively fleeting. It is a great-sounding album with lots of interesting, referential ideas to the past and how they've reared their (often ugly) head all over again. However, when it closes with a track mirroring the (excellent) opening title track, after only a relatively short time apart, its effect doesn't feel quite as earned as if this was even just, say, ten minutes and a couple tracks longer. It is extremely rare for one to complain about 'less is more' but it feels here that the band have only really scratched the surface of the central themes of the album leaving it to feel a bit shallow overall.

The second track, 'Bleeding Blue' for instance, literally builds on the relatively simple statements and questions on the album's opener by exploring these ideas a bit more fully. And, as aforementioned, while the album's structure works too, but its quickness to reach the climax leaves it a bit devoid of resolutions and making it feel like a bit of an empty statement. It's a shame because, Love is Love, for what it is, is such a well-composed album, that it feels like it's close to being a band-defining statement given its all too real context in which it exists. Perhaps one should give them the benefit of the doubt in this constantly changing and frightening period of time, there are no defining statements to be made just yet as it is still unfolding, and maybe that's what makes Woods' latest effort worthwhile. Uncertain times indeed.

Pitchfork 68

Woods have never been a band of grand gestures. Over nine albums in a dozen years, changes for the Brooklyn indie folk band have been incremental. There was the record where they ditched the tape effects of G. Lucas Crane (2012’s Bend Beyond) to discover that one of their signature elements wasn’t as integral to the group as thought. There was the one that proudly flaunted itself as the first Woods full-length recorded in a “real studio” (2014’s With Light and With Love), a move that stripped lo-fi as a defining characteristic. For a band that’s rivaled in success by both a former member (Kevin Morby) and a soundalike (Whitney), there is an unspoken imperative that their 10th record shifts the status quo, and songwriter and bandleader Jeremy Earl is explicit in stating his intention: Love Is Love is a political album.

The platitude from the days following the 2016 presidential election stated that at least we’d get good music out of the era of Donald Trump. Besides the obvious fallacy that good tunes somehow could make up for contingents of people having their rights stripped, this also ignores that there will be releases of all sorts of quality responding to the political climate. Earl struggles with this notion over the six songs and 31 minutes of Love Is Love. The title alone is a mantra that seeks to gain meaning through its repetition, echoing Lin-Manuel Miranda’s poem at the 2016 Tony Awards dedicated to the victims of the Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting, used here as the core of the record’s bookends. It’s a phrase that sounds better on a picket sign than it does in a real-world application, where it doesn’t take a cynic to note that love’s mere existence isn’t negating laws or bombs or walls.

Earl’s sloganeering doesn’t end there. On “Bleeding Blue,” he reflects on election’s immediate aftermath, with flower-power cadences applied to lines like “Have you heard the news? Hate can’t lose” and “I am the wind/Love’s not dead.” The album’s closing track, “Love Is Love (Sun on Time)” asks “How can we love if this won’t go away? How can we love with this kind of hate?” It’s enough to think Earl might start quoting John Lennon or even Moulin Rouge!. Yes, love is a many splendored thing, but on a lyric sheet announces itself as “A Meditation on Love” and literally ends with a peace sign, the need to have something to say should be predicated by actually having something to say.

Where Love Is Love lacks ambiguity is in its musical presentation. Woods’ incorporation of jazz on last year’s City Sun Eater in the River of Light returns the ten-minute leg-stretcher “Spring Is in the Air,” full of patent leather vibrato and a lava-lamp glow balanced by a moaning horn section, a versatile layer of sound throughout the album. On “Hit That Drum,” Alec Spiegelman’s saxophone and flute are both texture and canvas for Earl to pile on the drama, while Cole Kamen-Green’s trumpet grounds “Bleeding Blue” in a triumphant spirit that paints the song as a rally rather than a wallow. Earl as bandleader is getting the most out of his supporting cast, allowing his effortless pop sensibilities to form the collection’s sturdy spine.

On “Lost in a Crowd,” Earl retreats to one of his most charming tendencies. He fills his lines with a few too many syllables and has to rush out the lyrics, singing “Just when we thought that it couldn’t get worse/I’m lost in a crowd, a descending darkness.” It’s a direct sentiment that lacks the heavy-handedness of the rest of the record. Here, Earl allows himself to be confused, battered, and worried. He doesn’t have all the answers for the world and he doesn’t have to. The ease of his melody is matched by his own ideas. It might be a small notion, but that’s where Woods operate most efficiently, for a moment achieving the solidarity that Love Is Love desperately seeks.