As a rule, people make unintentionally hilarious faces when they’re having sex, dancing or playing a musical instrument with great conviction. If you’re really invested in whatever it is you’re doing, the odds are that your mouth is screwed up and your eyes are squeezed shut. The distance between what you think you look like and what you actually look like couldn’t be bigger.

Dan Werb and Paul Banwatt, a.k.a. Woodhands, have been told before that they look nerdy when they perform, but unlike legions of nerds before them who decided to reclaim the insult, Woodhands won’t accept it. Not because they lack self-awareness —?they just reject the idea that visibly having fun and being cool are mutually exclusive.

Werb sighs: “The arc of our live reviews, I can tell you exactly how every single one goes. ‘Dan Werb looks like a nerd, but then they played this amazing show’.”

“But it’s always sexiness,” Banwatt interjects. “The sexiness of your nerdiness. It’s not a bad thing.”
I ask whether they’ve considered adopting the more detached European vibe generally associated with, say, techno.

“Here’s the deal. I can only do the hard sell,” says Werb. “That’s my thing. Like, I don’t know subtlety when it comes to presenting myself, and that informs the music that we make. At least from my perspective. The Junior Boys do that shit so fuckin’ well, and they write beautiful melodies, but that’s just not us. We’re not super fuckin’ cool dudes. I’m an extremely emotional person, in some ways.”

 “Dancer,” the fiery, propulsive first track on Woodhands’ frenetic and spectacular new disc, Heart Attack (their debut for Paper Bag Records, in stores April 1), demonstrates this pretty convincingly. The verses of “Dancer” consist of Maylee Todd from Henri Faberge and the Adorables crooning about a gentleman whispering sweet nothings in her ear, over Werb’s warm-yet-squelchy synth squiggles and punctuated by Banwatt’s titanic fills. The chorus consists of Werb screaming “YOU’RE A VERY GOOD DANCER!! WHAT IS YOUR NAME? WHAT IS YOUR NAME?” like a man striking up a conversation with someone while simultaneously being chased by rabid bulldogs. Of course, it’s based on a true story.

“I’d never really been to a rave before. I wasn’t on drugs or anything,” explains Werb almost apologetically. The BC native had just played a Woodhands set at a rave on Vancouver Island when he and former band member Roselle Healy (with whom he was romantically involved at the time) decided to check out a techno DJ’s set. “And I just… I don’t know what the fuck happened, but I started screaming at her in this faux-German accent, ‘You’re a very good dancer, what is your name, what is your name’ and like dancing European-ly around her. To the point where dudes were like, ‘Is this guy bothering you?’ She was… embarrassed. Which she had a right to be.”

“But the song is very sweet,” Banwatt affectionately points out, observing that, in the mind of the aggro Euro character, his technique is perfectly acceptable.

Before Werb and Banwatt cemented their partnership, Woodhands had gone through numerous incarnations in Vancouver, Paris and Montreal, at times including Healy, bassist Pat Placzek and a host of other players. What the pair call “the second iteration of Woodhands” began in January ’07; after Werb and the Mississauga-raised Banwatt met at Henri Faberge and the Adorables’ Sept. 2006 CD release show at the Palais Royale, they started playing together regularly, and their on-stage chemistry developed quickly.

 “Paul’s drums are right at the front of the stage,” says Werb, “my shit’s right at the front of the stage and we have an eye-contact thing going the whole time. And because we allow ourselves to go off on tangents musically, there’s a lot of communication. I think that a lot of the response that people have given us has been about that relationship, about how rewarding it is to see performers interacting like that instead of just like four dudes on stage.”

Banwatt adds, “We definitely don’t want to be in our own separate worlds when we’re performing. We are best friends and that translates into the show very directly.”

But after dozens of local shows and several out-of-town dates, the duo felt like they hit a wall, wondering how they’d be able to go from being a local band to an international touring act.
Banwatt describes the moment where their frustration peaked while sitting in their car after a show. “We were lamenting the fact that a lot of people were paying attention, we were getting great press, great blog postings, but we didn’t feel any closer to getting our music out there in the way we wanted to.”

And then everything fell into place, as things sometimes do for acts who’ve been honing a killer live show for months. Following their showcase at Pop Montreal last October, Paper Bag approached them, and after some deliberation (Werb says “We held out, because we’re super awesome businessmen”), they signed and, after working out arrangements and laying down tracks with producer Roger Leavens, started getting ready to bestow Heart Attack on the world.
It’s not easy to process at first, this oddly aggressive and sometimes extremely sensitive music made on instruments generally associated with rigid structure and icy composure, a style that Woodhands’ earlier incarnations more closely resembled. Woodhands Mark II aren’t the first to bring rock’s intensity to electronic music —?with their live drums as well as their disdain for laptops and pre-programmed sequencing, Holy Fuck is an obvious comparison —?but even within that template, there’s a lot of room for unabashedly strong personalities like theirs to express themselves.
That might mean Banwatt stepping outside the limits of rock drumming (“Electronic music composers are the ones programming beats but they’re often not drummers. I’ve always tried to rid myself of what I’m supposed to be doing”) or it might be Werb’s lyrics, which even when they’re not openly confessional (the melancholy “Straighten the Curtains”) are delivered with a visceral frustration that would make Kraftwerk fall out of their impeccably-designed space-age studio furniture.

It’s sweaty, it’s sexy. It isn’t nerdy. The “hard sell” might not be cool in the disinterested sense of the word, but it works.

“I think it was our first show at Tiger Bar in January ’07 where I felt for the first time, it was like a clean break,” says Werb. “It was like all this long history of the band basically became an entirely separate chapter. And from that point on, I remember coming off stage and my voice was hoarse from screaming, and I was, like, ‘This is different.’”