Northside Festival Review: Woods at The Shank

There’s been a lot of hype about Woods in the last couple of months, and their set at The Shank (98 Bayard St in Greenpoint) with Kurt Vile, Blues Control, Grooms, and Pigmy Shrews was filled with people in response, even though they were an opening band. They did their best, but Woods didn’t live up to the excitement.

Their 2009 album, “Songs of Shame,” is a creepy take on Velvet Underground blues mixed with lo-fi country, made even more haunting by Jeremy Earl and Jarvis Taveneire’s falsetto singing on every song. In a live venue, the intricacy of their recordings doesn’t quite translate—any live footage is proof that the falsetto only works with studio trickery and multiple takes. The group’s guitar playing was interesting, though, a backwoods country mixed with cold electric blues. This Northside Festival gig proved what good album reviews can do for a band at least. It certainly isn’t Woods’ live performance that generates hype. Sure, Earl’s Woodsist label is a pretty respectable indie conglomerate, producing music by Blank Dog and Kurt Vile, and Songs of Shame is a nice summer album, a heartfelt and sincere enough exploration of folk and rock music to memorize and replay—but these guys just couldn’t keep it together on stage. They paused for huge amounts of time between songs and let their instruments fall out of tune.

The sound system at The Shank helped account for this, marring the set with technical problems, though other bands playing managed to cope better. Each song had the snap crackle pop of a poor PA system, and the guitars frequently strained to produce sound. The audience must have been won over by the album, though—or maybe they were just won over by the hype. Hard to say, but when Earl’s mic cut out on “The Number,” the audience picked up the slack, singing the words for him: “Waiting for the summer so that you cannot rest.” All those voices sounded better than the rice krispy falsetto trying to blast its way through that little PA system. I guess we were waiting for the summer given the rainy weekend that the Northside Festival happened to fall on, but at the time I felt more like I was waiting for Woods to get off stage. Most of the crowd made a hasty exit once the group finished playing.