Down With the Woo

with Roosevelt and The Shut-Ups

Friday, December 15 @ 40 Watt Club

originally published December 13, 2006

Ben Gerrard

Heros Severum

Though nostalgia may be the driving force for those who show up at the 40 Watt tonight eager to relive the early '90s with Roosevelt, let's raise a glass as well to the equally compelling force of curiosity for the new. Down With the Woo, the next evolution for Eric Friar and Mandy Branch, the core of post-punk act Heros Severum, makes its Athens club debut at this show.

"I think that half of the people who listened to Heros Severum will like what we're doing now," says Friar. "The sound of the new band grew out of the direction that Heros Severum was headed in before we split. I think the other half of the people who listened to Heros will hate our guts." Bassist-saxophonist Winston Parker joins Friar and Branch in creating a sound that taps into the rhythmic, playful undercurrents present on Heros Severum's final album Plague Dogs; the new work is slightly funky and soulful, sometimes woozy, and certainly much brighter and poppier than what came before.

Down With the Woo's MySpace page calls the band "a live production experiment," suggesting an exploration of the studio strategies of Downtown Athens Recording Company engineer Friar into a live setting. "Our show is powered by a Mac G4 running ProTools. A lot of the effects are automated," says Friar. "We have a few classic old drum machines combined with real percussion. We have submixes running out to different speakers in the audience with percussion and synths. Most important, we record every performance with the idea being to build an archive with every show the band has ever played. Eventually the best parts of the performances will be culled for release as an album. We're kicking around the idea of burning copies of the show for sale as you leave the venue, but we're still working out the logistics of that."