Woody's A Girl - Into the Red

Woody's A Girl

Into the Red
self-released; 2013

3.8 out of 5

By J Simpson

Writing reviews can be hard. The temptation is to state simply what something is, casting it in stone, and let the audience decide if that is something they'd be interested in or not. Music, however, is a time-based art, that is to say, it unfolds over time. It has a beginning, middle and end. Every album is a story, and every story is a journey.

Into The Red from Woody's A Girl is a story in three segments conceived over the span of two years. Woody's A Girl is Trisha Farnan, from Perth, Australia, and Billy Bedard, of Bakersfield, California. The pair met in a Smashing Pumpkins fan forum. They have never met in person, collaborating across the hemispheres.

Woody's A Girl has an everything and the kitchen sink approach to songwriting, citing pop, rock, goth, psychedelic, folk and shoegaze. Farnan and Bedard are clearly interested in telling complex and layered stories, and will stop at nothing, and take from everywhere to get there.

According to the band, Into The Red is comprised of three segments: "the first being an accessible, "loud/soft" pop/rock style, reminiscent of early ‘90s rock, the second section being softer, more acoustic based, drawing influences from ‘60s folk and psychedelia, and the third section was meant as a dark experimental and atmospheric place."

It's quite a journey.

Woody's A Girl fleshes out the bare rock template of acoustic and electric guitars with cellos, organs, mallets, ebows and flutes, making a atmospheric rock/psychedelic folk hybrid. I can say that Woody's A Girl will appeal to fans of good early '90s grunge/alt-rock, like Liz Phair and PJ Harvey, with a similar 4-track, blurred around the edges quality, as well as dream poppers who like Cocteau Twins and The Cure, and even their beloved The Smashing Pumpkins.

Woody's A Girl has a yen for descending chromatic chord changes, giving a woozy, unsettled feeling to their songs that amp up the tension and anxiety before resolving into a satisfying climax. Even though Woody's A Girl doesn't belong to one dedicated scene, they stand to crossover into all of them. This is honest music; reflective of the world we're living in. Created across oceans and hemispheres, and using every tool at our disposal to tell our stories.

In the future, every band will be its own genre. Better learn to listen across the lines. 

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