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As founder of the Brooklyn-based Woodsist label (and its cassette-only adjunct, Fuck It Tapes), Jeremy Earl has had a hand in midwifing a fair number of buzzy bands fond of swaddling their songs in static and hiss, including Vivian Girls, Crystal Stilts and Wavves.  As a result, he’s probably heard every possible criticism there is regarding “lo-fi”—it’s a distracting affectation and a cred-baiting hipster pose. It’s being done to disguise threadbare songwriting, and it's the emperor's new clothes.

Such accusations have been unfairly leveled at Earl’s own group, Woods, too.  The band’s association with Shrimper Records—one of the original lo-fi progenitors and home to early releases by The Mountain Goats and Low Barlow's Sentridoh—only helps to draw distinctions between the true believers and those supposedly faking the fidelity. Most of these accusations are garbage, anyway, and few bands dismiss them as well as Woods.  Folks willing to look past the superficial sound find ramshackle tunes that funnel the relaxed acid-laced torpor of the Laurel Canyon scene through the beguiling strum-and-drum simplicity of The Velvet Underground and the noise-as-instrument aesthetic that typified the most rewarding “lo-fi” recordings.

On records like 2009’s Songs Of Shame (a Woodsist/ Shrimper co-release), less-than-pristine fidelity casts the charming songs as unassuming and inspired campfire sing-alongs, the results of pals hanging out roasting marshmallows and working on their CSNY harmonies (or solo Graham Nash covers, actually).  And in case winning songs like “Rain On” still don’t dissuade notions of Woods using static merely as a songwriting crutch, 2010’s At Echo Lake pulls that curtain away to reveal the honest-to-goodness songs that attentive listeners always knew were there. —David Raposa