My first, promising reaction: What a weird band. They come at you with blustery post-punk and easygoing Peach State twang all at once, one vocalist (Eric Friar) coughing clenched half-syllables, the other (Sheryl Branch) honoring the homeland in silken diphthongs. Percussive clatter, wormy synths, shrill interlocking guitars, and sax skronk play musical chairs around lots of really interesting melodies. Clearly this trio has studied its Jawbox and Burning Airlines LPs, taken additional cues from Smart Went Crazy, the Dismemberment Plan, Les Savy Fav, and Giddy Motors, and simplified those sources to a basic linear geometry. The Athens thing is a red herring: Except a brief spate of ethereal vocal harmonics on "A Nice Haircut" and some of Branch's backup singing, nothing here bespeaks a psychedelic indolence. Plague Dogs reaches even further back into the 90s for its frissons.
What, because we're into the second half of this decade bands can start cribbing from the second half of the last? If they do it as confidently, creatively, and playfully as Heros Severum, I say let 'em go nuts. Plague Dogs weatherstrips sorta-obscure vestiges of late 90's indie rock, reminding us of when syncopation was cool and J. Robbins recorded every fourth album. Whereas Robbins' projects tended to spotlight thick, sludgy/funky bass, Heros Severum do without the instrument altogether. When your drummer's as good as Davey Staton, having a pared-down (read: one man) rhythm section is emancipating, like Little Timmy losing his training wheels. Staton performs many tricks, including limber open stroke rolls ("3kh2") and dizzying tom-kick whirligigs ("And Introducing"). Guitars prove their chops by keeping up, weaving polyrhythmic formworks. Near-constant vocals give direction to the cosmology, but some songs satisfy a wanderlust through hypnotic call-and-response vamps. In other words, Heros Severum are the kind of band that could list "jam band" on Myspace for larfs and wouldn't be lying entirely.
Dare you to call their bluff, but the could-be-joking bits function as well as humor-- even when they essay smarmy rap slang. "And Introducing..." first practices less-is-more around the vocal, drawing focus to Branch's jive talk ("Got a chicken neck, coke bottle, broken back spine/ Better watch it, man, 'fore I whoop your behind"), then, as if to contraindicate such use of singsongy hip-hop affect, the band let rip on some intricate kicks, words ousted by floating vowel sounds. Friar's lyrics are uniformly terse and nonsensical; he sings like he lacks the breath for more than one or two syllables at a time. The style enables him to issue galvanizing rally cries, which sound more meaningful than they probably are. On "Sick Dog", at what may be the album's apogee, he screams fearlessly, "Can't keep a brother down," over molten sax blurt. "A Nice Haircut" asks, "Were ya raised proper?" (like this is a band to talk!), then schools in skeletal groove, tamped down tight and shot from Gang of Four's stiff-is-the-new-loose bazooka. Heros Severum are obviously not the first to use levity as a foil against what's at heart complex and quite measured songwriting, but they've made it the crux of a surprisingly fresh record.
