The 2012 Dance Marathon Battle of the Bands’ selected competitors will perform at Tommy Nevin’s Pub at 8 p.m. on February 23, Dance Marathon confirmed in an email Monday night.
Bands Almost All-Purpose, Damn Straight, Jet Jaguar and The Amazing Invincibles are set to compete for a chance to perform on March 3 during Dance Marathon. All proceeds from the annual show’s $5 admissions fees will go to this year’s DM beneficiaries, The Andrew McDonough B+ Foundation for childhood cancer and the Evanston Community Foundation.
This Battle of the Bands will be the first time rap duo Damn Straight performs their songs for “anyone besides ourselves in our own rooms,” said Medill junior Emilia Barrosse, known by the rap name Small Fry. Her partner, Communication junior Mori Einsidler, or SloMo, propositioned her to start rapping together after hearing Barrosse rap in her previous band. They started mixing beats and writing funny lyrics in their free time.
“It was just a fun thing. We don’t think we’re like T.I. or Jay-Z or anything,” said Barrosse. “We recorded this one song and it sounded really good. Then we recorded over the summer and ended up having an EP, like 6 songs.”
Damn Straight applied for the competition because they thought their music was a good fit for DM. Barrosse compared their jams to Party Rock Anthem by LMFAO.
“Our music’s really fun, and it’s funny. It’s just the kind of thing that, like, raises people’s spirits and gets them excited,” she said. “So, I’m really stoked to be in battle of the bands, to have that potential to be in DM. We kind of felt like we’d be the right kind of vibe for DM.”
The Amazing Invincibles, who recently changed their name from The Indecisive, started three years ago with three high school students. They play “alternative jazz blues rock music,” according to Weinberg freshman Erica Minor, the band’s drummer. “It’s not really one specific genre.”
The other members of the band are Ian Rottner and Jesse Herscher, both freshmen at the College of Lake County in Grayslake, Illinois, Warrant Township High School senior Adam Kowalczyk and School of the Art Institute of Chicago freshman Annie Cho.
The band The Reels Green was selected, but recently pulled out of the competition, according to DM Public Relations Co-Chair Sourav Bhowmick. Battle of the Bands will proceed with the four selected groups.
Correction: The blog roll excerpt for this story originally published the name of the band The Amazing Invincibles as The Indecisive. The actual post correctly reported the name, but North by Northwestern sincerely regrets the error. Thanks for Dance Marathon for pointing that out.