Science! Jim Elenteny and Justin Stang
By Tucker Petertil
“Are you the guy with long hair or are you the guy with short hair?”
I ask this over the phone on my way to meet Justin Stang after he’d emailed me a photo of his new band Science!.
Turns out Justin is the long dread haired singer and guitarist and Jim Elenteny is his Science! partner. Jim also plays bass in the Seattle jam band Nefarious Jones while Justin also sings and plays guitar in the PNW jamrock group Sideways Reign and tours around the country as a solo act.
Justin moved to the PNW six years ago at the suggestion of his cousin,Casey Dehe, who lives in Shelton and is a long time friend of Trail and Joel Black of High Ceiling. The High Ceiling brothers inspired Justin and Casey to start their own band and after adding Cody Goodwin on bass and drummer Mike Dennis, Sideways Reign was born.
Fast forward to a couple of months ago when Joel had the chance to move to Olympia, he says “It struck me as a community I wanted to be part of.”
Over tea at Café Vita Justin tells me that in the five years Sideways Reign has been together they’ve produced a couple CDs and toured all over the country and hope to play again in Olympia this coming January.
Justin and Jim, both in their early 30s, have known each other since high school in Long Island and after they both relocated to the Northwest, they reconnected over music and Science! Originally a side project, Science! has morphed a important direction they want their music to take.
Justin hands me a CD of three Science! demo songs that he had just burnt saying they plan on fleshing it out to six songs that they hope to have available in a couple of weeks.
Justin adds, “we live in an age of short attention spans, and I love to keep listeners engaged and always have something that I’m working on for people who want to have new music in their hands.”
As a way of introducing me to the songs on the Science! EP Justin tells me of Sideways Reign’s history of community involvement including a High School scholarship, adoption of a section of Highway 101 to keep litter free and a soccer team sponsorship.
Justin also ran as a state senator last year and wants to carry that activism over to Science! with plans of donating money from their EP sales to local school science programs.
He calls the music on the Science! EP ‘social songs’, with “Chains” the first song being about a wrongly convicted man on Death Row, it was inspired by the late Troy Davis. He’s also certain there’ll be a song about the Occupy movement.
The other songs are inspired by the trip that Justin made with Sideways Reign to perform at the South By Southwest music fest in Austin, and those Texas locales just can’t help but show up on these next two songs.
“Abilene” is the kind of country rock that this town just doesn’t have enough of, though I just wish they’d have added some pedal steel guitar and sequin suits.
“Austin Tune” the first song that Jim and Justin wrote together is described by Justin as “a road tune, sort of getting lost to find yourself song.” With it’s “dusty roads” lyrics it could be kin to the Grateful Dead’s “Friend of the Devil” except it breaks down into a nice bridge.
All three songs are full of lively acoustic music, and Justin has a great voice, soulful and distinct and he knows how to project. Though Science! is a duo the EP’s songs are thoroughly fleshed out courtesy of multi-instrumentalist Jim who adds bass, drums and organ.
They plan to tour down to California and back after their upcoming gig at Charlie’s. It’ll be just the two of them on acoustic guitars but if their songs are all like these it’ll be a great set.
Science! plays Charlie’s Tavern on 4th Ave. Dec. 19th