The Woods - So Long Before Now

Quite the discovery from Dot Matrix with this retrospective of mid-80s New York four-piece, The Woods, a short-lived outfit mostly notable for introducing Linda Smith's music to the world. Truth be told, it wasn't much of an introduction first time around, amounting to a solitary 7" released via Justine in 1985 a year before the band eventually went their separate ways. So Long Before Now essentially functions as the debut album that never was, combining the two songs from that single with seven others recorded in NYC in 1986. It's strange we're only hearing this now, its previously unreleased status surely no consequence of the quality of the music itself, which feels entirely on the money for both its locale and era. The Velvets, like for many of the bands from that time, remain an obvious source of inspiration, though The Woods are highly adept at rechanneling that influence into their own charming lexicon, equal to their contemporaries locked into the David Roback/Kendra Smith axis on the opposite coast whilst sharing some of the folky-motorik propulsion of The Feelies or The Necessaries or even The Clean. It's even more surprising that none of these songs surfaced on the Strum and Thrum compilation from a few years back, as The Woods arguably represent the best distillation of that particular sound of driving but morose indie rock jangle. You get the idea: great forgotten band now back in the picture. Can we ever have enough of such things? We're probably going to run out of them sometime soon. Not yet just though, not just yet...