Wooden Shjips' members aren't the type to shift gears between records, but they're willing to venture outside their comfort zone by at least a few blocks. To record the new West, the San Francisco psychedelic band left behind the home studio where it made its previous records and moved to a professional facility in town. It also, for the first time, permitted an engineer into the recording process: For behind-the-scenes work, Phil Manley is a favorite among independent rock musicians in the Bay Area, respected as an artist-producer who can steer soundscapes vastly different from his own.
As a solo artist, Manley makes tight, synth-driven instrumentals, more than a few degrees removed from Wooden Shjips' predilection for rangy guitar solos. West doesn't seem to have much of his personal mark on it, except maybe in "Lazy Bones." The group's shortest song to date, it finds the band sounding surprisingly reined-in — tighter and faster than the rest of the album, it rides on a combustible riff and rattle-and-roll percussion.
Moving at a brisk pace, "Lazy Bones" is a road song placed in between long expanses of gritty progressive rock, so it plays closely to West's theme of restless movement. Throughout, guitarist Ripley Johnson sounds like a Dean Moriarty for the 21st century: utterly self-assured in his abstract quest of "chasing after ghosts in the auto industry." Where he's going, there's no need for a GPS.
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