A lot of people like talking up their plans to "cut an album" with their "band." Seth Kroll likes actually doing it.
"We basically put everything we had into [our album]," Kroll said. "So now we're kind of broke, but we have something to show for it."
Kroll, a senior in the School of International Service, is moving to Boston after graduation in May to reunite with the other four members of his band, Family Junction. Having known each other since childhood classes and summer camp, the band members played their first show together at the House of Blues in Cambridge, Mass., in 2003, and had such a blast that they decided to give collaboration a go.
The crew's first full-length album, "Pasta Bar," is described in Time Off, a leading Australian entertainment magazine, as possessing a "jam band/jazz-rock sound" with "an interesting mixture of styles."
It draws on everything from Sublime and 311 to Phish and the Grateful Dead. Regardless of the band's sound, the quintet has gone past the trite act of casually slinging out mentions of its musical activities over cheap cigarettes and beer at (insert trendy indie music club here). Indeed, the band has gone the distance, recording "Pasta Bar" during summer 2004 and releasing it early last September, according to Kroll, the group's lyricist.
To finance "Pasta Bar," which was recorded entirely in a garage-turned-laundry-room in guitarist/vocalist Alan Cohen's parents' Jersey Shore beach house, Kroll said the band members spent all last year working, even maintaining summer day jobs between shows and recording sessions.
"[The laundry room] happened to have pretty good acoustics, so we were able to set up a drum kit and all the amps and mixing board and computer," Kroll said. "It was perfect for us."
Family Junction's Web site decrees their main musical influences to be Guster and Dispatch, which is evident in the jammy, free-flowing feel of their album. Kroll said God Street Wine, Bob Dylan and "other artists with a social or political message" have also influenced him personally.
Although Kroll's college major - International Relations, with concentrations in Peace and Conflict Resolution and the Middle East - seems an unlikely choice for an aspiring musician, Kroll said what he's learned in class has expanded his cultural perspectives and contributed to how he writes the group's lyrics.
"We want to have some sort of significance, and we want listeners to feel that it wasn't just thrown together, that we really put thought and effort into all the songs we put together," Kroll said. "When [people] listen, we hope they see we're trying to address the situation. After September 11, there was widespread racism against Arab Americans and Muslim Americans, and that's just not right."
Kroll added that he began writing lyrics for "Cement Playgrounds," one of his songs, while zoning out during a class on globalization.
Although the band members have spent the last year in separate locales (with Kroll at AU, one member at Tufts University and the rest at school in the Boston area), Kroll said the Internet has helped them bounce ideas off each other, trading lyrics and music and packaging songs in preparation for their reunion.
"We've been writing pretty much consistently since we started the band," Kroll said. "In July and August we're planning on playing a bunch of shows in Boston, New York, D.C. and Philadelphia, and between those shows we plan on writing a lot of new stuff and trying to record some of it."
Family Junction may be willing to set out on the long, fabled road to rock 'n' roll stardom, but luckily they know it's not the end of the line.
"The idea ... is the only time that we'd be able to pursue music as a career is right after college, and we've decided that that's what we're going to put our time and effort into," Kroll said. "If it doesn't work out several years down the line, then we'll find another way to make a living, and I guess I'll look for a real job."
Family Junction will play the Grog and Tankard in D.C. on August 4. "Pasta Bar" is now available on iTunes and cdbaby.com. For more information, visit familyjunction.org.
