WHOABEAR

ORIGINAL PROGRAMMING

Whoabear dive into the deep end of electronica

By: MATT ASHARE |
Published: July 25, 2012

WHO: Whoabear and Red Rattles

WHEN: July 27, 10 p.m.

WHERE: Bull Branch, 109 11^th Street, Lynchburg, VA

COVER: Free, call (434) 847-8477

THREE OF A KIND: Dillard, Dodson, and Penkert at play.

Right around this time last year, Beau Dodson was sitting rather pretty with what most young musicians in town would consider a good gig, as the latest in a string of drummers who'd signed on to back veteran singer/songwriter David Sickman in the Bell Weather States. Dodson and the band's other two principals, bassist Adam Penkert and keyboardist Andrew Dillard, were forging a strong musical bond, and

Sickman, who'd made a name for himself as a founding member of the Charlottesville roots group the Hackensaw Boys a decade earlier, was using his old connections to generate a steady stream of gigs. Nothing to complain about.

       But just a few short months later, all that changed when Sickman rejoined the Hackensaw Boys, the Bell Weather States were put on indefinite hiatus, and Dillard, Dodson, and Penkert found themselves stuck without anyone to front the formidable musical force they'd become. There was, however, a silver lining of sorts: Dodson had a backlog of songs he'd been working on for several years, and he'd had a chance to perform a few of them at what turned out to be one of the last Bell Weather shows.

       "I sat on those songs for four or five years," Dodson recounts. "And then one of our shows in November at Rivermont Pizza got a little out of hand. . ."

       "We took a break outside," Penkert interjects with a puckish laugh. "And when we came back in I told Beau to start rapping. I took over on drums, and David was playing bass."

       "We had so much fun with it," Dodson continues. "And I remember on our way out of there Adam just said to me, 'Man, we gotta do something with this stuff.'"

       What they began to do with that "stuff" — mixing elements of rap, rock, and electronica — may have seemed like a major left turn for three guys who'd found a peaceful, easy Americana feel playing trad instruments with Sickman. But it rapidly evolved into a coherent, if somewhat quixotic, vision that coalesced around the trio’s deep appreciation of groove, with Dillard manning a growing arsenal of synths and sequencers, Penkert taking over on drums, and the long-maned, tattoo'd Dodson emerging as a fierce frontman. Indeed, they finished recording the three tracks for their self-released debut EP Hold Me, I'm Fascinating, and even completed a video for the electro-rap-rocking cut "The Day the Board Game Died,” before they finally managed to settle on a name for the band: Whoabear.

       Jump ahead to a humid Saturday afternoon in July. Whoabear are gearing up for their fifth gig, a show this Friday at Bull Branch. The EP's been mastered, pressed, and packaged, replete with an official Whoabear logo — a rough black-and-white drawing of roaring bear head. There's merch too, including rubber Whoabear wristbands, paper Whoabear masks, and even a complete Whoabear "care package," along with a solid ReverbNation website (http://www.reverbnation.com/whoabear), a YouTube "intro" to the band (http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?

v=uzUrdGpFgmA), and, of course, the video for "The Day the Board Game Died" (http://www.google.com/url), which has the look and feel of a "Sabotage"-style Beastie Boys production.

       Dillard, Dodson, and Penkert are sweating it out on a couple of makeshift benches, waiting to shoot their second video in the middle of what they refer to as "Sickman's farm," a small piece of land littered with random piles of wood and populated by a small cadre of goats who seem intent on eating just about anything that won't bite back. It’s a rather paradoxically pastoral setting for a trio who, with the exception of live drums, have essentially eschewed organic instrumentation for the tools of techno. But the members of Whoabear don’t make any clear-cut distinctions between the two.

“It's hard to really say what it is that we do,” offers Penkert.

“I've gotten to the point where when people ask what we do, I just say alternative-infused dance music,” Dillard suggests. “Basically, we've all been live players and now we're getting into sequencing and electronics. But everything I do when we play is live. So it's always a little different.”

Penkert nods and adds, “We all have jam roots and a lot of times I feel like we get going and then everything still comes together organically.”

That’s perhaps best reflected in the dramatic leaps of genre the band accomplishes in just three tracks on Hold Me, I’m Fascinating. Dub-inflected keys and a vaguely reggae beat lay the foundation for rapid-fire rapping on “25 Happy Street,” a track that works itself up to an aggro climax that’s heavy without the metal. “Long Time” rides a pair of glitch-pop synth lines into a prog-rocking chorus as Dodson delivers what amounts to a straight-up love letter, half-rapped/half-sung. And, “The Day the Board Game Died” is a throttling techno thrasher with melodic respites that serve as a base for intriguing internal monologue, a bit of mischief Dodson says was inspired by nothing more than a boring night alone at home.

“It’s about a guy's conscience catching up with him,” he explains. “I don't even know what he did. I'm big on user interpretation. I don't know what any of it means. It could mean a million things and that's kind of cool to me. Someone told me that the title meant a lot to him. And I was like, it's just a play on the title ‘The Day the Music Died.’ It's kind of like the board game dies and electronic music takes over.”

And yet, Whoabear haven’t been entirely taken over by electronics. As Dodson is happy to point out, “Every show's different, every song ends up different, the words are different each time. Nothing ever ends up the same and that's part of the fun.”

“A lot of that stems from David,” Dillard says of their former Bell Weather Statesman. “He led us off on all kinds of tangents we weren't expecting when we played shows. And, he was instrumental in getting us to this point. We played over a hundred shows with him. Basically, he showed us what was possible and now we're taking it from there.”