The Eerie Beauty on Love is Love
Despite containing only six tracks, Love is Love, from Brooklyn-based band Woods, is filled with funky, folk riffs that keep listeners on their toes with eerie, lo-fi gems, psychedelic guitar and vocals. Lyrically, this album is exceptional, but the true strength of the band lies within their instruments. They choose to highlight the rich complexities that all of their instruments have to offer and occasionally they add in a few dashes of harmonics.
The album opens with the title track “Love is Love,” a five minute, groovy jam in which lead vocalist Jeremy Earl sings falsetto, while twangy guitar solos play in the background. “Bleeding Blue” is the funkiest track on the record. Complete with trumpets and subtle keyboards, this song sounds like it would be plucked from Shaft or a Quentin Tarantino soundtrack. “Lost in the Crowd” sees the band returning to their folk roots. It’s a song that is one part Bright Eyes and one part The Moldy Peaches. The longest song on the album, clocking in at just over ten minutes, is “Spring Is In the Air.” It begins on a psychedelic note with guitars echoing before slowly being drowned out by tambourines, drums and wind instruments. It is a trippy journey that transitions between psychedelia and jazz and is the only song that features zero vocals. “Hit That Drum” sounds otherworldly with its space-like synth, as Earl sings gently out into the ether. The final song, “Love is Love Sun on Time,” rounds out the album with another funk-heavy song.
While most bands tend to sit comfortably in their allotted genre, Woods have defied any sort of label cast upon them and continue to experiment with their evolving sound. With Woods consistently releasing records since 2005, one might be concerned with this album getting lost in the band’s ever-growing discography. Love is Love, however, sounds like some of the band’s best music. It has the wonderful strangeness of Songs of Shame and the campy quality of Bend Beyond.
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