ORIGINAL
PROGRAMMING
Whoabear dive into the deep end of electronica
Published: July 25, 2012
WHO:
Whoabear and Red Rattles
WHEN:
July 27, 10 p.m.
WHERE:
Bull Branch, 109 11th 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.”
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