The Battle of the Bands

Eight acts took the stage of a crowded Cambridge Queen’s Head pub Friday night for Battle of the Bands. Four of those bands would win a contract with Veritas Records, Harvard’s student-run record company.

Already victors among the approximately 50 band submissions to compete in the Battle, the winners represent a range of styles.

Opening the night was Caitria O’Neill, the stand-in name for a band formed specifically for the competition.

“I found out I was playing in Battle of the Bands,” Caitria E. O’Neill ’11 told the audience in between songs, “and then I found out all of the other acts actually had a band.”

“So I asked my roommate Julie and Luke from the Frisbee team,” the singer-songwriter said.

“Luke from the Frisbee team”–Luke L. Sperduto ’11–accompanied O’Neill’s vocals on the guitar and then added a harmonica, much to the crowd’s delight.

For the last song, O’Neill took up her violin to round out “Julie’s Waltz,” named for Julie M. Wright ’11, who played piano and percussion back-up for the band.

Though they did not yet know that they would walk away from the contest with the opportunity to record an album with Veritas, the trio knew they needed to figure out how to identify their band.

“We went to bandnamegenerator.com,” O’Neill said, which produced results such as Pear Tree at Point’s End and Running for Rabbits. Unready to accept these alliterative suggestions, the band asked the growing crowd for ideas.

Maybe the self-titled route isn’t so bad.

Frontman Benjamin M. Kultgen ’08 describes The Ben Kultgen Band as “halfway in between Coldplay and John Mayer.” For Kultgen, the highlight of Friday’s show was playing a solo with his guitar behind his head while wearing eighties clothing. And then there was the winning part, which Kultgen said he hopes will give his band more exposure.

Kultgen said after the band’s formation last year that he had to weigh his divided devotion to academics and the band, for which Kultgen is singer, songwriter, and guitarist.

The philosophy concentrator said he met with his thesis advisor last year to discuss whether to write a thesis or focus on his music.

“‘It’s obvious, he said, ‘You gotta do the rock band,’” Kultgen said.

For Start, Go!, the Battle turned out to be a surprisingly auspicious beginning.

Chris Powers, the singer, song-writer and guitarist for Start, Go! said their first performance together was exhilarating but not perfect. Powers, a senior computer science major at the Extension School, broke a guitar string in the middle of a song.

He had a spare, but he didn’t realize that guitar’s jack was broken. He finished the set with the broken string.

The glitch did not prevent Start, Go! from securing the prize.

The same thing happened to Elephantom. Pianist, songwriter and secondary vocalist Matthew A. Aucoin ’12 said when the group’s guitarist’s string broke, they had to beg the audience for a replacement guitar. Finally, the kindness of strangers came through.

“Some random person handed us a guitar,” Aucoin said.

Drawing on a wide variety of instrumentation, including trumpet, piano, guitar, and bass, the band has been playing around Boston since 2006. Half of the six members are still in high school, and the rest go to college locally.

Aucoin said Elephantom’s sound has been compared to styles ranging from Radiohead’s to classical music.

There’s more than a record deal in store for these four acts. The winners will also advance to another of competition in the spring, according to Caitlin V. Crump ’10, general manager of Veritas Records.

The winners of the fall round automatically qualify for the spring Battle of the Bands, which will pit acts from eight different schools in Rock Hard, a competition run in a joint venture between Veritas Records and Rolling Stone magazine. MTV will host news spots in the spring battle, which will span five night clubs and two and a half months.

Crump said the winners were chosen based on online votes—which indicate the scope of a group’s fan base—and the input of judge Ethan B. Schiffres, a student at Harvard Law School who works with Recording Artists Project, which allows HLS students to provide pro bono legal services for local members of the music industry.

—Staff writer Chelsea L. Shover can be reached clshover@fas.harvard.edu.