Wooden Shjips, Naked on the Vague, Circle Pit

San Francisco's newest psychedelic noise pleasers, the enigmatically named Wooden Shjips, have been likened to the gauzy drone of Spacemen 3, the jangly garage of 13th Floor Elevators and the slinky organ of The Doors. "It's funny because people started comparing us to bands that we were never really that into," Wooden Shjips' vocalist Ripley Johnson says. "I mean, The Doors, I was never a fan. They're OK, I guess."

The name isn't necessarily homage to the Crosby, Stills and Nash song 'Wooden Ships' either. Nor is the cameo appearance of a ‘J' because people should always keep a jay, or joint, in the middle of their gatefold. "We were just having a goof with the name. It is sort of a tribute to the 60s San Francisco scene – free love and drug experimentation and all that sort of thing. But it's not like we sit around all day smoking pot and listening to Crosby, Stills and Nash and Jefferson Airplane." Tentatively he adds, "some of us smoke a lot of weed, some of us don't. When you're one guy doing interviews representing the whole band, you've got to be careful what you say."

When Wooden Shjips was conceived in 2003, not only was Ripley ambivalent about The Doors, but about playing gigs, getting famous and creating any sort of accessible aural experience. His original intention was to locate a group of non-musicians for the purposes of making innovative and experimental dance music. "No-one in the band, apart from me, could actually play an instrument, apart from maybe taking a few piano lessons as a kid and being able to play 'Chopsticks'. Our manifesto was something about limiting the chords to three per song, and being a dance band. We're all about bringing dance music back to rock and roll. Not that people really dance at our shows, but we try."

A far cry from the bangin' electro more commonly associated with dance music, Wooden Shjips' second full length album Dos continues to plough the visceral furrows first heard on 2007's self-titled debut and last year's collection of singles and rarities, Vol.1. The warbled vocals and mystic, mantric trance are heavily informed by White Light/White Heat-era Velvet Underground. "My favourite Velvet Underground is 'Sister Ray' kind of stuff, the bootleg stuff, where they play a song for 30 minutes. The Velvet Underground would play 'Sister Ray' at suburban dance parties and teeny-boppers would dance around. People don't really think of them like that. But that was the idea: to play these long, droney jams with repetitive rhythms that people could dance to."

Wooden Shjips' foray into the music world was similarly unconventional. Eschewing both a myspace page and a website with mp3 downloads, a self-released 10″ was given away for free to anyone who gave their address to the band. "It was all part of this experiment," Ripley explains. "I thought, why don't we just give our records away, leave them lying around libraries and on buses and park benches and sneak them into record stalls?  This happened around the same time that blogs got really popular and people started blogging about us and we started getting requests from other countries and it all snowballed from there. We were paying international shipping, but the gimmick actually worked." Joanna Lowry