The show will be at the Freshman Academy in Danielsville, and is free and open to all ages. Music begins at noon on Saturday, May 29, and continues until 10 p.m.
Performing at this year’s RockFest are: Diamondback, Midnite Marauders, Sounds of Silence, Mercury Veil, Morbid Innocence, Entropic Constant, Clockwork Holocaust, The End of Alice and Blind by Sight.
In addition, Romanenko, of Athens, is one of the bands set to play that’s ready to show Madison County something a little different.
After years of playing around the musical hubbub of Athens, the band is now touring regionally. Romanenko often makes stops in Auburn, Ala., Charlotte, N.C., and other neighboring states, as well as frequent shows in the Atlanta area.
Although a less typical platform, playing at RockFest wasn’t something the band was interested in avoiding. Romanenko vocalist and guitarist, Jessie Marston, said that the versatility of the three-piece band has the ability to cater to the tastes of many different listeners.
“I think it’s important to go outside of your comfort zone,” she said. “It’s a blessing for us because we can do shows like (Rockfest) where we’re different from everybody else, and people will probably dig it, you know? People will hear something maybe that they won’t expect and like something they might not have realized they would enjoy.”
Marston first picked up a guitar when she was 14 years old, and at 22, has rarely put it down since.
“I started out playing like really poppy stuff,” she said. “And then that turned into really punk stuff, and then I kind of wanted to try and write more mature songs, and so I started writing songs by myself, like more folky songs.”
Marston attributes her earlier days of songwriting as a catalyst for where Romanenko is now. The folk elements from her solo days, while not quite hidden, still require some searching for from listeners.
The evolution of Romanenko was an involved one. After a brief stint living out west in California, Marston returned to Georgia where she teamed up with drummer Erika Rickson. The duo soon decided to leave the Gwinnett-area to find out what the musically renowned City of Athens had to offer.
“We moved to Athens to try to really take the band somewhere – because we both, you know, we took the music really seriously,” Marston said. “And we knew that was what we both really wanted to do.”
Romanenko became the band’s name as a sort of homage to Marston’s former roommate back in California, Yuriy Romanenko.
“He was just my best friend and just an awesome person,” she said. “That was kind of a difficult time in my life and he was really there for me.”
That, coupled with the aesthetics of the word, and the name stuck.
It wasn’t long before Marston and Rickson joined with bassist T.J. Machado and began fine-tuning their sound.
“We were kind of edging away from folky,” Marston said. “Erika and T.J. just could not help it – they could not stop trying to rock - and I was very resistant to it at first.”
One thing Romanenko strives for with their sound is to keep in mind substance over style.
“People don’t really play what we’re going for,” Marston said. “I feel like a lot of bands lately kind of write songs backwards where they’re just writing songs to facilitate the music … and we do it the other way around. We play the music to facilitate a song, and so we have a very songwriter approach, which is sort of a dying thing in terms of just regular old rock and roll.”
The band likes to keep it simple and Marston said that being a trio is something that serves the band well, still allowing each member to have their musical voices heard. There’s no frill with Romanenko and the band strays away from guitar effects leaving them with nothing to hide behind.
“People really have a hard time picking a band to compare us to,” Marston said. “They usually end up picking bands that are very flattering to be compared to, like the Pixies. We get that a lot. Other times, I think people feel like they have to compare us to other bands and so they have trouble coming up with something and they end up comparing us to stuff that I think is just completely way off.”
Marston said that she, Rickson and Machado each have similar tastes and a wide-range of the music they are influenced by, including everything from Slayer to Dolly Parton.
“We all really enjoy playing all those different types of music,” she said. “And we all really are involved in a lot of different styles of music. So that kind of all bleeds through into these just really catchy pop songs.”
Weeding out the less hooky and less catchy songs is something Marston pays close attention to while writing. She likes to follow what she calls the “McCartney Rule of Songwriting.”
“When you first start a song or start writing a song, don’t write it down,” she said. “You don’t write it down because if you can’t remember it the next day, why would anybody else?”
Romanenko is hoping to get their first album re-mastered, remixed and re-pressed by the end of the year.
A digital version of Romanenko’s first album may be purchased on the band’s Web site at RomanenkoMusic.com. In addition, three songs are available for free download, and t-shirts and stickers are available for purchase at the site as well as at shows. The first half of the album may be listened to for free at Myspace.com/Romanenkomusic.
