"Blue Sky Bends", by Wooden Shjips. That's right. "Shjips". Here is a band that neither could, nor necessarily should want to, distance themselves from Neil Young, and yet they seem to want to do this so strongly that they have adopted the following two-pronged approach: (1) to name themselves after a song from an album by Crosby, Stills, Nash and not Young; and (2) to adopt an aberrant spelling of that song's title. They are, however, forgiven (although "Shjips" is damned hard to type).
There's something about the sound of this band that I really, really love. They kind of float along on a soft haze of psychedelia, adding just the right amount of hinted-at malevolence to keep things interesting. What you get, really, is a cross between Opal's "Happy Nightmare Baby" and Spacemen 3's "Perfect Prescription", and if you were going to be looking for touchstones for a career in music you could do far, far worse than those two.
