Wooden Shjips Are Best Of The Bay Material.

The Wood Shjips made it into the San Francisco Bay Guardian's Best Of The Bay 2007 issue under the challenging category of Wavy, Hazy, Raging Jams - way to go dudes. Their debut full length album is due out on Holy Mountain label on Sept.18th. Until then you can catch the Shjips live on August 1st at the Hemlock Tavern in San Francisco, CA.

Best Of the Bay issue July 25th 2007
BEST WAVY, HAZY, RAGING JAMS

Some ships know how to glide in and commandeer a music fest. Exhibit A: Wooden Shjips at this year's South by Southwest, blowing minds and getting Rolling Stone worked up into a frantic, photo-snapping lather with raging psych-fugues and a perpetual guitar boogie machine. Led by guitarist Ripley Johnson, these fellas (along with local sensation Comets on Fire) are bringing sexy guitar solos back, big-time, for listeners who have long eschewed Steve Vai and Joe Satriani. Theirs aren't quite the unquestioned, inevitable jams of yore. Like others of their earache generation, Wooden Shjips were touched by the sharp, urban clamor of first-wave punk and hardcore; indoctrinated in the junkie garage toolshed of Velvet Underground and Nuggets; and then bruised in the mosh pit of Dead Moon and Mudhoney. Solos are undertaken less for posturing effect than to create a space for shrooming experimentation. Hey, that's just the way we like it - and we're not alone, judging from the cult of popularity that's bloomed around the group. Shjips, ahoy.