More reasons to love Y-Luv

You’re at the “funnest” party you’ve ever been to in your entire life. It happens to be on a rocket ship. Destination: Venus. To top it off, you’re on the verge of taking shots.

That’s how USC’s up-and-coming indie band Y-Luv describes its music.

All night · The members of Y-Luv practice in a storage room at the Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity house. The space has become the band’s jamming spot. - Nathaniel Gonzalez | Daily Trojan

“Our influences are the Clash, Pepper, Bloc Party, Kings of Leon,” said lead singer and guitarist Freddy Janney.

The quirky foursome opened for the Los Angeles-based electronic music duo The Crystal Method’s secret show at the Echoplex in Echo Park on Nov. 7.

“It was nerve-wracking — it was a big crowd. We were just really excited and brought a lot of energy,” said bassist Luke Hanna.

The performance was Y-Luv’s latest accomplishment — and biggest crowd — to date.

After being ranked first in the nation on collegebattleofthebands.com, Y-Luv was selected to compete in the Southern California Regionals. The band out-performed two other groups to snag a spot in the West Semi-Finals at the end of the year and the aforementioned gig for TCM.

“It was a lot of fun. I’ve always gone to see other people at the Echoplex, so it was fun to play it,” Hanna said.

In spite of its growing popularity, Y-Luv’s members are refreshingly down-to-earth. There is a natural chemistry evident in their sarcastic exchanges as well as their jam sessions.

Plenty of both abound in a revamped storage room of Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity’s subterranean parking garage, a niche Y-Luv claimed for practice.

Even though Y-Luv’s origins are in Boston, this particular group has only been together since last January, when Hanna joined.

“Since Luke joined, it’s become a band. Before that it was a little bit of a mess,” said guitarist and back-up vocalist Sam Nardella, noting the band didn’t practice as frequently before Hanna arrived.

“A band is made of four people, so when you have one person not doing a lot of work, that’s a 75 percent, that’s a C. I want As,” Nardella joked.

But Nardella didn’t completely discount the band’s last bass player.

“With him we got to start playing; we got to know each other,” he said.

Nardella and Janney brought Y-Luv to Los Angeles from the East Coast, where they went to high school in Boston and started “jamming together.” In total, the band has been together for three years, but not without its trials.

“I want to just tell a story when Sam came up to us and said, ‘I’m going to quit the band,’” said drummer Marcello Dubaz.

“I wanted to be free,” Nardella added. “Freddy made me [rejoin]. I didn’t have strong enough words to say, ‘No.’”

Even the band’s name has undergone some changes.

“I drew the symbol [of a heart encompassing the letter ‘Y’] when I was a senior in high school,” Janney said. “I had a recording studio and started writing songs, and the name came from the symbol. My parents said Y-Love.”

When the band members started playing, however, they quickly found that the name had to be changed.

“There’s a Jewish Hasidic rapper with that name so we changed it to Luv,” Janney laughed. “It’s interesting because the name is not comprised of any actual words.”

In the band’s typical comedic form, Nardella chimed in, “The craziest part about it is that Y-Luv sounds better.”

Phonetics aside, people are starting to love Y-Luv, as evidenced by the band’s success both on campus and in Hollywood. The group has performed at venues like the Plush Lounge at the Key Club, the Knitting Factory, to name a few.

Earlier this year, the group won another battle of the bands competition sponsored by Grammy-U. They were one of two bands chosen to play at Grammy-U’s event, where they had the opportunity to perform in front of a panel of big-name judges, including the music director for Michael Jackson’s tour and a Grammy-winning mastering engineer.

One of the judges, the bass player for Ozzy Osbourne, told Y-Luv, “When you’re on stage, you look like you’re meant to be there,” Hanna said.

Both bands were scored at the event, and Y-Luv won — a bonus because its competition, Louder Than Words, was from across the town at UCLA.

For now, the band is content performing in the moment, save for a few small aspirations, including touring Amsterdam, appearing on Ashton Kutcher’s TV show “Punk’d” and “somehow getting written into the cast of The Hills,” Janney said.

“By the end of it, we just want to be the special guests at all the hot clubs,” Dubaz joked.

Nardella graduates at the end of the year, and Janney hopes he will be able get a job in Los Angeles so the band has at least one more year together until the rest graduate in May 2011.

“Our short-term goal is to make Y-Luv big enough and worth it — unquestionably worth it — to stay together after we graduate,” Hanna said.

But in all seriousness, it is the symbol of the Y in the heart, which beats with the bass drum, that keeps the band grounded.

“If you want to know what gets us going, just look at the bass drum,” Dubaz said.

Right now, it has a strong beat.