Wooden Shjips

Overview

Wooden Shjips are a trance-rock quartet featuring a guy called Dusty, a guy called Ripley and a guy called Nash. The band as we know them today formed in 2006 yet draws on the sound of '60s and '70s bands like The Doors and electric Neil Young, and they all grew up on the East Coast of the United States yet devoted their latest album to the romanticism of the American West.

But do you think Wooden Shjips care about things like time and space barriers? As if. Their maximum-volume psych transcends both those things to bring audiences a listening experience that is timelessly captivating, sort of like watching an ageing stoner rock his head back and forth in a smoky garage. Often equated to the Japanese phenomenon called maboroshi, which means something along the lines of “phantom” or “illusion”, these guys exist in a dream state of their own fabrication in which anything is possible. And after six years they have, consciously or unconsciously, developed a signature sound that powerfully fuses spaced-out desert rock with the groove-friendly timbre of 1970s boogie.

Helping transform their Sydney audience in to a hypnotic state will be psychedelic shoegazers The Laurels, and the trippy synths of Daniel Stricker (Midnight Juggernauts) and Chris Ross’ (ex Wolfmother) new project DCM.