LEAVE IT TO a band from Bushwick to call itself Woods. “Our name describes us perfectly, because we all love nature and being in the woods,” says drummer Jarvis Taveniere. But that hasn’t stopped the group from gigging regularly in all the usual warehouses and basements, appealing to urban mountain men and plain old rockers alike. And now the band will be headlining a show at one of the least outdoorsy venues possible: The Whitney. On Friday, Woods will play a shot with Austin,Texas–based YellowFever as part of the museum’s excitingly heavy-on-local-rock Whitney Live series.
It all started when three of the band’s members—lead vocalist and guitarist Jeremy Earl, Taveniere and “tape-master” George Lucas Crane—met as students at SUNY Purchase. Only after all members of the trio graduated did Woods begin to take shape. Earl, an upstate New York native, began recording a solo album called Woods Family Creeps, and invited Taveniere to begin collaborating on some of the songs. By now, the two were living in a place called Rear House in Bushwick, and they began to perform regularly in the neighborhood.Their friend Crane then joined the duo, and although his musical background was pretty scant, he began playing live samples from cassettes, calling himself the “tape-master.”
It wasn't until last year that Woods found its fourth member, bassist Kevin Morbey. “Through friends of friends he ended up staying at Rear House for a few months last summer,” says Taveniere. “We fell in love with him and told him he couldn’t leave.” The Kansas City native originally started by playing live shows with Woods, and now he plans to be on future recordings.
While Woods has several other albums, it wasn’t until this year’s Songs of Shame that Earl and Taveniere collaborated on songwriting. Starting off mostly with vocals, songs like “The Number” and “Down This Road” build up humbly, eventually offsetting quietness with increasing drums and guitar.The cover of Graham Nash’s “Military Madness” is marked by Earl’s voice, reminiscent of Neil Young, and these goosebump-inducing vocals are carried through in “Born To Lose.”The most epic is surely “September With Pete,” which is void of vocals and has a psychedelic nine-minute build-up and breakdown of guitars, drums and bass.
With uplifting music and an optimistic point of view, the only dark thing about Woods is it video for “To Clean.” In it, the band stands around an elaborately decorated table covered by all types of food—grapes, corn, bananas, cake, fish heads, steak—which also hang from strings on the ceiling.The four musicians gorge themselves and are soon stabbing each other with knives, hitting each other on the head with hammers and seemingly killing each other.They survive, and then perform in a grungy room with butchered meat hanging from the ceiling.The band members say the theme is nothing more than ritualistic. Maybe the boys have been spending too much time together out in the woods.
> Woods
July 24, Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Ave. (at E. 75th St.), 212-570-3600; 7, FREE with museum admission.
