In the wake of the post-post-punk explosion — and the as-yet unofficially defined psych-punk explosion — we’ve all been a little spoiled: an embarrassment of punk-rock riches/pitches, if you will. With all these great two-chords-and-a-cloud-of-lo-fi-rust bands crawling speedily out of the woodwork, it’d be easy to take a group like Woven Bones, a plum off the Hozac Records family tree, for granted. Don’t.
A predominantly Ramones-y trip through the boroughs of New York — though WoBo’s are from Austin — in a souped-up, modern vehicle, Woven Bones’ In and Out and Back Again, like most relatively straightforward, non-Wire/-Swell Maps/-Suicide/-Television punk, doesn’t so much reinvent the wheel as refine/reassess it for a new generation. Who has room for trebly synths and convoluted chords when you’re trying to rock?
Woven Bones stick to the Point and stay snugly in the Pocket (they’ll slip right in there with your wallet, keys, and gum). Not only that, but they do a nice job of it; you won’t be yearning for complications. The tom-tom leads, the traditional punk chords, the rumbling bass that sort of mushes the whole concoction together: it all sounds fairly boring, but stack singer Andrew Burr’s so-Joey-Ramone-ish-it-must-be-in-fact-Joey-Ramone-…-but-it-isn’t vocals overtop, and you have a recipe for raucousness that it’d be silly to argue with. (It’s not as easy to affect JR as many think, mind you. It takes skill to be slightly out of tune — but just in-tune enough — in this manner, and sounding like you have the voice of a 2-year-old kid during playtime without goin’ all Raffy with it ain’t easy neether, cracka; give credit where credit is due.)
As usual, I find myself drawn to the tracks that take that extra step outside the typical penny-for-your-punk thoughts. Or, should I say, that extra, extra, EXtra step. “Blind Conscience” is the best example of ratcheting up the tension tenfold, a slower, low-tom-driven beat and churning guitars providing a seedbed for Burr’s slightly out-of-whack soil and shovel. “Blind Conscience,” like so many of In and Out and Back Again’s tunes, explores a simple riff and deviates very little from it, opting instead to (a) layer slight fluctuations above and around the grooves (as on “Blind Conscience”), or (b) rock so fast/hard/FURiously that getting bored is never a possibility (as on “Your Way with My Life,” the strongest track here).
You might remember I just complained that the latest Ty Segall adhered too strictly to selection/option (a), so allow me to clarify: The difference — along with option/selection (b) — is the ability to sense when a song should end. It’s not something you can teach, and Woven Bones have a sense of pacing that film directors would envy. Furthermore, In and Out supplies enough variation in tempo and temper to render W. Bones’ formula effective, something Melted failed to do consistently.
Any way you slice it, Woven Bones cut deeper than most punk bands, In and Out and Back Again a strangely sliver-like LP that gets in, gets on with it, and gets the EFF out in an extremely well-lubed, effortless fashion. Perhaps that’s the secret: It takes a genius to dumb things down without, in turn, watering them down.
More about: Woven Bones
