2007 misses: speck mountain & wooden shjips

hopefully i keep finding cool shit from last year or this theme is gonna die.

speck mountain 'summer above'
wooden shjips 'wooden shjips'
when i hear the term space rock i get a few sound images swirling around inside my head. explosions in the sky, the secret machines, spacemen3/spiritualized, pink floyd (specifically the 'piper at the gates of dawn', 'meddle', 'dark side of the moon' and 'saucerful of secrets' eras. yeah i know, that's almost all of it.) all different but correctly labeled: space rock--and the definition kinda depends on the listener. this doesn't mean a 12 song album based on a HAL9000 and david bowman conversation or a 12 minute totally trippified-wah guitar solo about 'event horizon' being kickass. i mean, it can but what i'm shooting for is some non-crunchy guitar noodling, 1000 lbs of reverb, maybe certainly some delay/chorus as well, synths, maybe a slower tempo, some ohhs and ahhs vox, and an overall ethereal ambience that--if the correct dosage is taken--gives the feeling of floating past the earth and not really giving a shit. (this has nothing to do with the fact that speck mountain sounds a lot like mazzy star.) check out spiritualized's 'sway' if you get a second for some clarification. while wooden shjips is clearly the more spaced of these two bands, both dive head fucking first into psychedelic as well. these are my two favorite ''unknown before this year'' records of the year. that i missed the first time around.

speck mountain - stockholm
wooden shjips - we ask you to ride


go buy whatcha likes and delete whatcha don't