Meet the unsung stars of campus nightlife

There’s nothing better than live music. But now that electronic music has taken over the charts and parties, it’s easy to overlook the bands making people dance with sweet guitar riffs and groovy drum fills.

With the help of the Brown Music Co-op (BMC), a vibrant community of student bands perform at parties, downtown venues, BMC organized concerts and even at Spring Weekend.

The Tab sat down with three popular bands on campus — Butter, Feng Shui Police and Young Hummus — to find out how they began, what music they play and if they can offer any advice to new bands.

Butter : Marion (Vocals), Peter (Trombone), Alex (Keyboard), Peter (Bass), Paul (Drums)

We formed at the beginning of last year when Peter Enriquez (Bass) sent a message to all of us with the intention of getting  together and playing in what was originally an R&B band. The idea was to play a really funky set that would make people dance.

We play mostly funk, but definitely incorporate a lot of hip-hop in our stuff. We sometimes have guest MCs come rap on some of our songs. We’re also pretty involved in the Jazz scene, so most of our stuff ends up sounding kind of jazzy.

I think we made a conscious effort to stick to covers. We do a lot of throwback stuff, like semi-ironic covers of pop songs from the last decade, but they have to be bangers — that’s a prerequisite. We spend a lot of time arranging them though, and we tend to cover other people’s arrangements. Our motto is basically maximize the funk.

What we’re trying to do is to have fun with our friends for our friends, so it’s hard to imagine playing at the Madison Square Garden. But you know what would be fun? Opening for George Clinton and Funkadelic or any big funk collective.

Our advice is just do stuff that’s fun and don’t take yourself too seriously, because then you don’t have fun and the audience doesn’t have fun. You want people to like you. So much of this is based on your friends and who you can and want to bring out to the show, and why you want to play music.

 

Feng Shui Police : Dash (Vocals, Guitar), Hariz (Bass), Evan (Drums)

Our debut was at a show organized by Unheard our freshman year. Somebody set us up, we jammed and it was cool so we decided to play a show together. We played some covers and some original music, it was chill. Then the next year we started playing properly.

No one knows exactly where our name came from. We were just coming up with random names, you know. Every time you come up with a band name, some band member’s like “I don’t about this.” So we eventually decided we had to go with something and wrote a list of like a hundred, two hundred band names and just started cutting them down. But ultimately I think we got the name from a blog we found called fengshuipolice.com .

We only play original music at this point. We’ve now got two EPs out.

We’d love to open for The Rolling Stones, Mitski, King Krule.

We play garage rock, punk rock. We’re trying to do more acoustic guitar stuff, with more bass and drums, but still like punk rock.

Recording is super important for a new band, it really gives you a different perspective on your music. Having music to show is also a huge thing, like if you want to play at venues you have something available for people to hear what you sound like. And playing real gigs is a big deal too, it’s very different.

Young Hummus : Noah (Guitar, Vocals), James (Guitar, Vocals), Jack (Bass), Isaac (Drums)

It all started at a BMC jam. We just all got together and decided to keep playing.

Somtimes Isaac called James “Young Jame” for some reason, but then we were like “what if you pronounce James as if it were a Spanish word” and so then it becomes Jamés. And then we were in the group text jokingly like “oh we should call the band Young Hummus” and everyone loved it.

We play Folk-Punk — that’s what somebody described it as. But we should probably be Garagy-punk-folky-hummusy rock. It’s kind of alternative.

We don’t exclusively write, we also play covers.

We’d love to open for The Beatles (if they were alive), the Wiggles, Wilko, the Clash, Kanye West, or Weird Al.

We are a new band. Our advice is take time to practice, play a lot of gigs, just play at every opportunity. Also, have a few demos of yourself on line.