Features

Spotlight:: JEFF the Brotherhood

Photo by Chad Wadsorth

Jamin Orrall is searching YouTube for videos of people covering songs by his band JEFF the Brotherhood while his brother and sole bandmate Jake Orrall watches the computer screen over his shoulder. The first couple pages of search results don’t reveal any covers but a video titled “crowd fail” attracts their attention.

“I wonder if that’s one where you crowd surf and fall,” ventures Jamin. Jake responds, “Let’s see!”

It is. In fact, it’s somebody’s phone video of Jake taking an exuberant leap into a Canadian crowd, only to be dropped onto Jamin’s kick drum.

They both get a good laugh out of it. There isn’t such thing as wounded pride when you’re the sort of ebullient, youthful punk rock showmen who aren’t afraid to go for it in the moment—a quality that’s made for some truly memorable JEFF performances.

For instance, no one who caught the band’s television debut on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon is likely to forget it any time soon. “We kind of played it up,” Jake deadpans.

He’s referring to when he and Jamin stretched the instrumental intro of their song “Diamond Way” into a two-minute metal riff ramp-up, made intense eye contact with the camera from as many angles as possible, enlisted a buddy of theirs to munch a sandwich onstage with conspicuous nonchalance and slipped a plush wolf hat onto Fallon’s head just to see if he’d wear it.

“We thought it would add an element of uncertainty to the performance,” says Jake of the sandwich-eating guy, who, for the record, was paid union scale.

The brothers talk about their band almost like it’s an experiment whose success has come as a happy surprise. “We’re still getting our minds blown just, like, as we’re doing this—that we can do this,” says 23-year-old Jamin, who got a taste of a full-time rock and roll gig in band Be Your Own Pet before leaving the group in 2007. “Or that people are actually interested,” 25-year-old Jake adds. (He was also in Be Your Own Pet but left before the first album was released.) “That enough people are interested where we don’t have to work at a coffee shop,” clarifies Jamin.