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Wooden Shjips, "Back to Land"
This is a bit of a surprising album, as it finds one of American's premiere psych-rock bands noticeably toning down the more psych-inspired aspects of their work in favor of a more sun-dappled, spacious strain of rock.  Fortunately, that move towards a cleaner, more melodic sound coincides with an impressive leap forward in their songwriting, resulting in a handful of great, memorable songs amidst all the newly subtle Spacemen 3/Suicide/Hawkwind worship.  The full album is still a bit too formulaic overall for my liking, but the Shjips demonstrate they know how to craft a killer single or two.
Back to Land is the sort of album that makes me nostalgic for the wide-eyed innocence of my life before I became a music critic, when I could just enjoy an album without thinking about it too much.  I suspect that the old me would have liked Back to Land a lot more than the current me, as Wooden Shjips sound great doing what they do.  Unfortunately, my initial thrill with the opening title track began to yield diminishing returns as its formula was repeated again and again as the album unfolded.
It is hard to objectively say whether that is my problem alone, but this is certainly an album where the seams show: most of these songs are built upon little more than a simple, obsessively repeating, Suicide-style organ pattern (though it is sometimes transposed to guitar or bass).  Admittedly, the Shjips pull off a neat trick in appropriating Suicide's aesthetic wholesale and translating it into something resembling driving classic rock, but once I noticed the rigid template, I could not stop noticing it.  These are all quite catchy, propulsive songs, but they are mostly obvious variations on roughly the same catchy, propulsive root.
There are admittedly some divergences though, which are delivered with varying degrees of success.  The fairly straightforward rock of the breezy "These Shadows" is the least interesting of the lot, though it is still pleasant–there just is not anything for more outré-minded music fans like myself to grab onto at all.  "Other Stars," on the other hand, is just flat-out Hawkwind channeling: there is a simple groove and some space-y flanging and not much else. On the bright side, Wooden Shjips happily avoid Hawkwind's heavy-handedness, wild indulgence, and frequent ridiculousness, so it is not wasted effort.  The last aberration, however, turns out to be the album's absolute high point: the closing "Everybody Knows."  Like the aforementioned "These Shadows," it is essentially another straightforward rock song, but everything about it is great: the pace, the vocal melody, the chord progression, the bittersweet organ hook–just...everything.  It is easily one of my favorite songs of the year.
Back to Land's other great song is one of the omnipresent rockin' Suicide pastiches: "Servants," a piece that beautifully illustrates how many unexpected variables are involved in getting a song just right.  In fact, the only real difference between it and Back to Land's lesser variations seems to be its pace.  While it admittedly boasts a better-than-average vocal hook, most of its magic occurs simply because its somewhat druggy, slowed-down speed is ideal for turning the endlessly repeating bass line into something quite mesmerizing.
I suspect a lot of people will like this album a lot more than I do, owing to my extreme and perhaps irrational sensitivity to overt-influence-wearing and rigid formulas.  I still do like this album a lot though–I just choose to see Wooden Shjips as more of a "singles band."  I also suspect that some people will be very disappointed in the Shjips' decision to step away from psychedelia a bit, but it is not like they had a totally unique sound that they willfully compromised for increased popularity.  Rather, they merely downplayed their genre tropes to let in a bit more personality and songcraft, a transition that is off to an extremely promising beginning.
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