Name: MV & EE Workingman's Smile by WOODSIST in Psychedelic Rock & Beyond
Duration: 4 min 29 s
Description: from the Space Homestead album out May 15th on Woodsist

@musicazura: where is the really good stuff? I just checked out your profile, and all I found was really lame edm.

Psychedelic Rock & Beyond

John Andrews & The Yawns
Bad Posture
woodsist089
LP / Digital
Street date: March 10, 2017


"Throughout his years of traveling, John Andrews has documented his life with his home recordings. His first record, Bit By The Fang, found him living in the amish country of Lancaster, PA. His latest record, Bad Posture finds him waving farewell to Pennsylvania & greeting the wooded hills of Barrington, NH. Sitting on top of one of these hills, coined Mt. Misery, is the colonial era farmhouse John now calls his home. This is where Bad Posture was born. 

	The songs were written slowly & quietly throughout the winter, usually late at night next to the wood stove for warmth. It was recorded in his barn with the doors ajar, welcoming the springtime. The humble recording gear invites the outside noises in. You can hear the crickets chirping with the occasional truck driving by. The songs themselves lend their hand like slow backwoods Beatles demos covered in a thin blanket of tape hiss. John’s voice lulls us in an earthy calmness as he sits hunched like a scarecrow over the piano.

	Andrews’ band, The Yawns, has been crystallized with staples from the New England freak scene; Rachel Neveu & Lukas Goudreault (MMOSS/Soft Eyes) & Joey Schneider. All of who have been playing up in the free country for many years themselves and all of who call the same farmhouse home. 

	Over the past few years John has played as a session player on records by Woods, Widowspeak, EZTV & Kevin Morby as well as composing & recording with his band Quilt. Yet, the piano compositions on Bad Posture place him as a stand-out voice with this instrument. There are guitar-bands working in a similar territory as Andrews’, yet the focus on keys in many of the songs give the album a different temperament and a unique place amidst his peers. Windmill, Homesick In Heaven & Old News are three of the album cuts that boast this specific sense of multi-instrumentality. They wink at you with a Workingman’s Dead smile. The opener and lead-single, Drivers, showcases an older & wiser Andrews’ coming to terms with a new-found independence, the overdriven guitar echoing his home-state’s slogan, live free or die. “I don’t owe you no more.” Andrews hums.  

	Bad Posture was mixed with headphones at the foot of Emma Critchett's grave, who lived in the Yawns’ house during the 1800's. The record is an ode to her & all who have lived in this house. It also paints a picture of what it feels like to live in the “free-country” on the precipice of a rapidly changing political climate. Some folks go back to the woods to escape the harsh-realities of contemporary society, for Andrews it seems like he is diving head first into nature’s unknown, searching for love in the tundras of seclusion. When the cities become boring, we hop in our vehicles and drive to those places that are always beaming with newness. Bad Posture contains the anthems that will hold us over til’ we arrive." - Shane Butler

Bad Posture

John Andrews & The Yawns - Drivers

"We walked down streets and crammed onto trains, our faces masks of fear. Unsure how to react, we, collectively, did not react. We grieved for a country and an ideal we never thought would die. We grieved for a loss of certainty.

We argued about what we thought would happen. We preached understanding. We advocated for anger. Some people said that we’d at least get some incredible art, other people said that was a small view of a world we were quickly realizing we’d misunderstood. Everyone was right. Everyone was wrong. Art made in precarious times matters as much as we let it matter.

But what are we looking for from the art we enjoy? Escapism? A reckoning with harsh reality? A temporary shared hallucination? Music can heal because it presents the pain of being human as universal. 

Love is Love was written and recorded in the two months immediately following the election, but it’s not a record borne entirely of angry, knee-jerk reaction to what America is becoming. Instead, it’s a meditation on love, and on what life means now. Taking cues from last year’s City Sun Eater in the River of Light, it feels very much like a record made from living, shoulder to shoulder, in a major city: weaving psychedelic swirls of guitar between languid horns reminiscent of the best Ethiopian jazz—Love is Love is a distinctly New York record. It is a document of protest in uncertain times and an open-hearted rejection of cynicism in favor of emotional honesty. It is bright, and then, unexpectedly, a little dark sometimes too.

There will be parts of life where we will watch as events unfold and we will feel helpless. We will not be sure of the future. On good days, we’ll have each other. On the bad ones, we’ll turn to the art that helps us feel something. Love is Love is a document of the new world we live in, proof that light can come from despair and hope is still possible. We just need a little help remembering it exists."- Sam Hockley-Smith

WOODS - LOVE IS LOVE

First single from Shannon Lay's new record out September 2017.

"Debut release on Kevin Morby's new imprint with Woodsist Records. Shannon Lay's Living Water is an instant classic. Recorded by Emmet Kelly (Cairo Gang, Bonnie Prince Billy, Ty Segall) in his Los Angeles home studio, this is an album where you can hear the room reacting to the music taking shape around it. Shannon has a voice that transcends time and space. You can't tell if she's old or new, if she's sitting next to you, on a mountain top, or down in some canyon. Already her second LP to be released in 2017, Shannon is a prolific songwriter, one who lives and breaths melody and with guitar skills to boot. Despite it's 14 tracks, Living Water comes in well under 40 minutes, but like Pink Moon or Just Another Diamond Day before it, this is music so potent it exists outside the realms of time - but in a world specific only to itself and the new feelings it creates. 

Shannon has been dominating the local scene in Los Angeles over the past two years, leaving everyone who witnesses completely breathless. Having just finished a tour with Ty Segall, Shannon is set to support Kevin Morby on a national tour this fall."

Living Water

Shannon Lay  - The Moons Detriment

The new full-length by Brooklyn synth psych band Weird Owl, due out October 2017. 
Order now!
https://weirdowl.bandcamp.com/album/bubblegum-brainwaves
Recorded, mixed and produced by Jeffrey Berner at Galuminum Foil Studios, Brooklyn, NY 2017.

Invisibility Cloak

Stop Mute Defeat

Importance 101

Shannon Lay - Recording 15

ANNA ST. LOUIS
FIRST SONGS
woodsist092 / mare002
release date: November 3, 2017

Despite her last name, Anna St. Louis was born and raised in Kansas City. She grew up a painter and singing in punk bands, eventually leaving her hometown to attend art school in Philadelphia. After graduating she made the move to Los Angeles where she began teaching herself guitar, writing songs and recording them on her own in her bedroom. First Songs is the sound of someone discovering their talent in real time - a peak into the collage of a wonderful mind that is absorbing their new surroundings and using new tools to put them into the room. Listening to this collection you can feel the sun coming in through the window - Anna on the foot of the bed with a guitar on her knee, finding her voice. St. Louis wears her influences well - think Patsy Cline singing over John Fahey - but has a style all her own. And while you can take the artist out of the midwest, you can't take the midwest out of the artist - so let this be known; this is Midwestern music ran through a California filter. I believe Anna will have many more releases in her lifetime, but let it all begin here - First Songs.

ANNA ST. LOUIS - Fire (Mare Records)

from the Space Homestead album out May 15th on Woodsist

MV & EE Workingman's Smile

Nobody Home

ARTIST: Bonny Doon
ALBUM TITLE: Longwave
LABEL: Woodsist
CATALOG NUMBER: woodsist093
RELEASE DATE: March 23, 2018

Arriving in the early months of 2017, Bonny Doon’s self-titled debut was a warm introduction to the Detroit quartet for many. Hazy and bright, the album’s woozy melodies and swirling webs of summery guitar textures were easily ingested as low-key slacker pop, blissfully awash in lo-fi sensibilities and dreamy ambiance. But the nonchalant breeziness belied a serious attention to songcraft that beckoned careful listening, and hinted at depths yet unexplored. Lo and behold, before the ink was even dry on the first record, work had already begun on its follow-up Longwave, a conscious about-face from the sonic experimentation of the first album, and a journey inward.

Opting for spontaneity and simplicity over the exploration of layers and textures that defined the first record, the band architected an incredibly intimate sound for these new songs. The album was tracked with minimal overdubs or production flourishes, constructing a frame that is spare and understated. The songs on Longwave amble through moonlit fields of melancholy guitar leads and self-reflection, the collection unfolding almost as one uninterrupted conversation with self. The session aimed to capture the band at their essence. With the superfluous stripped away, a gentle but steadfast spiritual core is revealed as the backbone of Bonny Doon’s cosmic American music.

Bonny Doon - Long Wave

Artist: Anna St. Louis
Album title: If Only There Was a River
woodsist094 / mare003
CD / LP / Digital
Release date: Oct 12, 2018

Anna St. Louis - The Bells

Artist: Anna St. Louis
Album title: If Only There Was a River
woodsist094 / mare003
LP / Digital
Release date: Oct 12, 2018

MV & EE Workingman's Smile

WOODSIST

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