Following in the footsteps of their incredibly successful Tufts predecessor, Guster, another up-and-coming Tufts band, The Juice, has set its sights in high places. So keep your ears peeled (if that's actually possible) in the next few months for more info about this quintet, which plays at Somerville's Abbey Lounge tonight and plans to release their first CD, a seven-song EP currently in production, within the next month.
This rock/pop band, which takes most of its influences from '90s bands such as Incubus, Dispatch and The Red Hot Chili Peppers, might be described as a mix between Guster and the much-missed ska/reggae band Sublime. Three of their demos can be heard on their website, thejuicemusic.com, which can tide you over until the release of their new EP. This latest project is tentatively titled "On the Rocks," and it is a disc that bassist Kenneth Kitchin says contains "more energy, and is more sonically dense."
The band itself consists of five friends with the same musical dream, developed and pursued after a few fateful Tufts-related encounters. Singer Leon Mandler and guitarist Mike Vitiello were high-school friends from Miami where they actually played together in a band called The Amps. Through a fluke roommate-matching placement - who says ResLife doesn't know what they're doing - Mandler and Vitiello became freshman-year roommates.
The two had planned on continuing with their musical projects at college, but the band was not properly formed until the duo met third addition Matt Ballinger while trying out for lacrosse. Ballinger, to his credit, is a veteran of the professional music scene, having been a member of the now-defunct Dreamstreet, of Disney fame.
Ballinger then recruited his suitemate and soon-to-be Juice bongo player, Jim Govatsos, into the mix. After a few fun jam sessions, it was unanimously agreed upon that the band needed a bassist, and Kenneth Kitchin, Ballinger's freshman-year roommate, rounded out the quintet.
Their first official bonding session, according to Vitiello, was frat-hopping at MIT. Vitiello remembers wandering around the waterfront with fellow Juicers, looking for parties when they found a few abandoned wrist-bands on the ground that they thought would gain them entry into the good parties.
Unfortunately, this was not the case, as they jumped into the window of a random building where they thought their mystery party was, only to find that the party was on the roof of the adjacent building. Once they had figured this out, the boys ended up literally crashing the party by jumping Spiderman-style onto the roof of the appropriate building and were summarily kicked out by bouncers less than an hour later.
Well, at least these guys know how to party.
But they know how to play, too. Instead of the classic bassist-guitarist-drummer-singer line-up, The Juice makes good use of the bongos (also like Guster), which creates a more down-to-earth folk feel to their music. Also, the Juice boasts the ability to feature two singers, giving their sound a bit of a more soul-oriented or R&B quality.
