Plague Dogs

Athens, GA, trio Heros Severum consists of two guitarists, Sherryl Amanda Branch and Eric Friar, and a drummer, Davey Staton. The lack of a bass guitarist in the usual rock band lineup really defines the group's sound; Branch and Friar trade noisy, jagged guitar riffs while Staton plays stop-and-start rhythms. The vocals, by Branch and Friar, tend more toward shouts and chants than actual singing of actual melodies. The spareness of the sound and the contrasting male and female vocals often recall an earlier Athens band, the B-52's, and Heros Severum's lyrics sometimes partake of some of the same absurdist impressionism of that group, if none of its zany humor. But the sound is actually much closer to that of Gang of Four, even if the songs have none of that post-punk British band's anger and political fervor. Actually, Heros Severum is sometimes at its best when it's just playing. For example, the five-minute "Party Next Door" goes on for three minutes before Friar starts the lyric, and those are three of the most enjoyable minutes on the disc. (Although the concluding track, "The Great Auk," is shown as running 8:37, in fact the song concludes at 3:56. Three minutes and three seconds of silence later, Branch appears singing an a cappella song about a drunk woman and her dog. It had seemed that the tedious fad for "hidden tracks" had passed. Not yet, apparently.)