Features

Spotlight:: JEFF the Brotherhood

Photo by Gary Copeland

Life without day jobs is relatively recent, but the Orralls have been playing together under one moniker or another and running their indie label Infinity Cat for around a decade. When they started, Jamin was in junior high and Jake was in high school, and as far as they knew, none of their classmates had their own D.I.Y. labels. “That was why we were doing it,” Jake laughs.

They’re sitting down for this interview at Infinity Cat’s present-day headquarters, a modest house in south Nashville, Tenn. that doubles as the band’s rehearsal space and Jake’s bachelor pad. (Jamin’s drumkit and Jake’s hulking amp fill a room scarcely bigger than a walk-in closet.) Their dad, Robert Ellis Orrall, is picking an acoustic guitar and singing in the kitchen; he’s not only an Infinity Cat co-owner but also a successful country and pop songwriter in his own right.

If anything, growing up in such close proximity to Nashville’s commercial music industry has made the brothers admirably savvy. They’ve signed a deal with Warner Brothers that will enable them to keep doing things their way, only on a larger scale.

Their way includes stocking their first two nationally distributed albums— Heavy Days and We Are the Champions —with tracks that don’t beat around the bush about grabbing ears. It’s the difference between the primal psychedelic jamming that’s been a part of their repertoire and the industrial strength power-pop hooks. Or between a track like “Droom Kit” on 2006’s Castle Storm —a minute of blistering punk-metal that gives way to eerily distant-sounding intoning and a spontaneous sprinkling of struck and dampened cymbals—and “Mellow Out”—a taut, ultra-catchy and, yes, still gloriously loud-as-ever track, that arrives just past the midway point of Champions.

“We’re still making just as many different types of music as a band—weird stuff—as we were before,” offers Jamin, displaying the cover art for an upcoming collection of their more abstract recordings on the computer screen. “I think, now, we’ve realized what stuff to really push, whereas when we first started it was like anything and everything we did. It was all over the place.”

One thing’s for sure—the brother’s unpredictability doesn’t cause the live audience to lose out. Their energy has its target, after all.

“I think we’ve always had the goal of making the shows fun—fun for us and fun for the people that are there—like a party,” says Jamin.

Jake echoes: “More than just watching a band play. We try to engage people.”