NOVEMBER 12, 2009 ISSUE
AVOW Plays Geno’s November 20
Boone-based Another Victim of War (AVOW) will perform at Geno’s Sports Lounge on Friday, November 20, at 10:00 p.m., and the cover is $5.
The band members describe AVOW’s sound as “heavy and loud,” a little industrial, a little old-school metal and a little old-school punk with a touch of Lennon.
“We make our own influences work together,” said Kenneth Dancy, who plays guitar.
The show at Geno’s will be a two-hour set, and the band has 15 songs lined up for the night. AVOW’s songs can be up to 8.5- to 10-minutes long and involve intricate guitar work. Songs range from the political to the introspective, but are never ballads or emo-style musings over lost loves, Dancy said.
“We always have positive feedback from the audience,” said Chris Harris, a vocalist who also provides samples and fine-tunes the drum machine.
Audience members often express pleasant surprise over AVOW’s unique brand of heavy, loud rock, saying they have never heard anything quite like it before, Harris said.
“We’re definitely a live band. Our live shows are really intense,” Harris said, adding that the band likes to incorporate visual elements and fog into shows.
“We like to keep the audience guessing [and] make it unpredictable,” he said.
AVOW has been performing for more than seven years, and Harris and Dancy began playing together several years before that.
“Some songs are 11, 12 [or] 13 years old,” Dancy said, adding that since the songs remain pertinent, they have been kept alive.
Oftentimes, the band will not write new material for a while, then come up with a crop of new songs all at once, Harris added.
Important musical contributions have also come from each of three former drummers, as well as from former bass players.
Dancy said he wants “to give props to former band members” because they helped shape the band’s sound into what it is today.
The newest members of the four-piece band are bassist Chris Pope and guitarist Jai Church, who have both been with AVOW for about a year.
Pope has known Dancy for about 20 years and joined the band when they had an opening for a bassist last year, he said.
Church, the friend of a former AVOW drummer’s sister, has been jamming with Dancy for about three years, on and off, Dancy said.
“I figured I could show her some tricks [and] she learned so quick, I brought her into the band,” Dancy said, adding that Church can play note-for-note with him “even though I’ve been playing longer than she’s been alive [26 years playing versus 22 years old].”
The band currently utilizes a drum machine, which has allowed AVOW to get more technical with its music and exude a more industrial sound, Dancy said.
Although all four of the bandmates grew up in Boone, they have often found their style of music embraced more enthusiastically by venues in other towns, and have been regularly playing in Asheville, Hickory and Morehead City. The upcoming show at Geno’s will mark the first time in more than a year that the band has played in its hometown.
AVOW has always played its songs in the key of D, but looks forward to introducing several songs in C to the Boone audience. In Asheville performances, the band has found that songs played in the lower tuning produce “a lot more energy” in the crowd, Dancy said.
And that is sufficient motivation, because Dancy, Harris and Pope were all originally drawn to music when, as kids, they witnessed the energy of a crowd when a band performed, they said.
For more information about AVOW, click to www.myspace.com/avow898.
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