Religion can rock, too

By Joe Brown

Friday, Aug. 29, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Meet the band: Summit Grove, a young — median age 19 — Las Vegas group to watch.

The sound: Earnest, energetic hybrid of thoughtful British and American pop, influenced by Death Cab for Cutie, Coldplay and Jimmy Eat World.

Origin story: Summit Grove was born in December when lead singer Jason Carter and guitarist Vincent Rennie, then both 16, met through a Las Vegas Christian youth program called YoungLife and talked about making music. Rennie had written a song titled “The One I’m Searching For” for his Coronado High School creative writing class as an extra credit assignment. Retitled “Jump Start My Broken Heart,” the song was the first for the baby band and since then has been remixed by friend and role model Alex Marshall of The Cab.

Rennie’s brother, drummer Dominic Rennie, now a 19-year-old film major at UNLV, dropped out of the local ska band One Pin Short and joined Summit Grove, followed by bassist Omar Garcia (now 24), a YoungLife leader, and Steven Johnson (now 20) on keyboards and guitar. They played their first show at Jillian’s Las Vegas with their buddies Hey Mister.

The name: The bandmates wrote more than 20 suggestions on a whiteboard, including The Radiogram and The White Board. One of the guys was heading home from the session and looked up at a street sign that read Summit Grove. He liked the name, called the guys on his cell phone, and the name became official.

Factoids:

• The band members pray before each performance.

• In February Summit Grove competed and won the Fusion Battle of the Bands at Central Christian Church in Las Vegas.

• Vincent Rennie has written more than 200 songs in the past two years. He also does all the booking for the band and designs the graphics.

• Dominic Rennie is the skinniest drummer you have ever seen, but he packs a wallop.

• They’re recording their upcoming CD at Garcia’s house, where they’ve turned a closet into a homemade recording studio with soundproofing foam.

• They booked their first-ever gig — at Jillian’s — with only one song in their repertoire and just three weeks to write enough for a set.

• They played the House of Blues last year — on a school night.

Potential big hit: That would be “Jump Start My Broken Heart.” “We were playing at Jillian’s and had planned on saving ‘Jump Start’ for last,” Vincent Rennie says. “People were cheering for an encore, but Jillian’s told us that because of a sound curfew they couldn’t allow us to play another song. We had fans who came all the way from Bakersfield, and we didn’t want them to leave without hearing their favorite song. So we grabbed our acoustic guitars and went outside and had everyone gather around us. It was really neat — everyone sang it with us.”

Next moves: “We’re still a young band. We started about eight months ago,” Vincent Rennie says. “But all of us have the ambition to keep going with music and actually make it into a career. We’re trying to get our names out there as much as possible on the Internet — our MySpace page (www.myspace.com/summitgrove) has had more than 130,000 views — which is pretty good for a new band. And we’re concentrating on playing lots of shows around Las Vegas, and eventually playing out of town, starting with California and Utah. We’ve already landed some opening slots ... for established local and national acts, including Secondhand Serenade, Jet Lag Gemini and Thee Armada. We’ve decided that well, we’re all Christian, that’s how we all started, so that’s who we are and how we write. We’re gonna go for a mainstream sound, though, so we’re not just hitting the Christian market. We just use it as another thing to write about, and to inspire other people as well.”

Why Vegas rocks: “Being in Vegas can actually be very helpful,” Vincent Rennie says. “My brother and I moved here three years ago from Michigan, and there’s not much of a scene there, and it’s really hard to get your name out there. There’s a good scene here, pretty much everybody knows everybody, and there’s always band drama,” he says, laughing. “Bands will help each other out to get different gigs, and sometimes even go on tour together. And there are a lot of scouts in Vegas right now, especially since a bunch of Las Vegas bands like The Cab, The Killers and Panic at the Disco have made it big.

Catch them before they get famous: Today, with Aurora Falls, Alta Revere, First Class Fever, That’s What She Said and We Build Ruins; 6 p.m. at Jillian’s Las Vegas, 450 Fremont St., $10; 759-0450,

www.jillianslasvegas.com