Photo by Chad Wadsorth

Jamin Orrall is searching YouTube for videos of people covering songs by his band JEFF the Brotherhood while his brother and sole bandmate Jake Orrall watches the computer screen over his shoulder. The first couple pages of search results don’t reveal any covers but a video titled “crowd fail” attracts their attention.

“I wonder if that’s one where you crowd surf and fall,” ventures Jamin. Jake responds, “Let’s see!”

It is. In fact, it’s somebody’s phone video of Jake taking an exuberant leap into a Canadian crowd, only to be dropped onto Jamin’s kick drum.

They both get a good laugh out of it. There isn’t such thing as wounded pride when you’re the sort of ebullient, youthful punk rock showmen who aren’t afraid to go for it in the moment – a quality that’s made for some truly memorable JEFF performances.

For instance, no one who caught the band’s television debut on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon is likely to forget it any time soon. “We kind of played it up,” Jake deadpans.

He’s referring to when he and Jamin stretched the instrumental intro of their song “Diamond Way” into a two-minute metal riff ramp-up, made intense eye contact with the camera from as many angles as possible, enlisted a buddy of theirs to munch a sandwich onstage with conspicuous nonchalance and slipped a plush wolf hat onto Fallon’s head just to see if he’d wear it.

“We thought it would add an element of uncertainty to the performance,” says Jake of the sandwich-eating guy, who, for the record, was paid union scale.

The brothers talk about their band almost like it’s an experiment whose success has come as a happy surprise. “We’re still getting our minds blown just, like, as we’re doing this – that we can do this,” says 23-year-old Jamin, who got a taste of a full-time rock and roll gig in band Be Your Own Pet before leaving the group in 2007. “Or that people are actually interested,” 25-year-old Jake adds. (He was also in Be Your Own Pet but left before the first album was released.) “That enough people are interested where we don’t have to work at a coffee shop,” clarifies Jamin.

Photo by Gary Copeland

Life without day jobs is relatively recent, but the Orralls have been playing together under one moniker or another and running their indie label Infinity Cat for around a decade. When they started, Jamin was in junior high and Jake was in high school, and as far as they knew, none of their classmates had their own D.I.Y. labels. “That was why we were doing it,” Jake laughs.

They’re sitting down for this interview at Infinity Cat’s present-day headquarters, a modest house in south Nashville, Tenn. that doubles as the band’s rehearsal space and Jake’s bachelor pad. (Jamin’s drumkit and Jake’s hulking amp fill a room scarcely bigger than a walk-in closet.) Their dad, Robert Ellis Orrall, is picking an acoustic guitar and singing in the kitchen; he’s not only an Infinity Cat co-owner but also a successful country and pop songwriter in his own right.

If anything, growing up in such close proximity to Nashville’s commercial music industry has made the brothers admirably savvy. They’ve signed a deal with Warner Brothers that will enable them to keep doing things their way, only on a larger scale.

Their way includes stocking their first two nationally distributed albums – Heavy Days and We Are the Champions – with tracks that don’t beat around the bush about grabbing ears. It’s the difference between the primal psychedelic jamming that’s been a part of their repertoire and the industrial strength power-pop hooks. Or between a track like “Droom Kit” on 2006’s Castle Storm – a minute of blistering punk-metal that gives way to eerily distant-sounding intoning and a spontaneous sprinkling of struck and dampened cymbals – and “Mellow Out” – a taut, ultra-catchy and, yes, still gloriously loud-as-ever track, that arrives just past the midway point of Champions.

“We’re still making just as many different types of music as a band – weird stuff – as we were before,” offers Jamin, displaying the cover art for an upcoming collection of their more abstract recordings on the computer screen. “I think, now, we’ve realized what stuff to really push, whereas when we first started it was like anything and everything we did. It was all over the place.”

One thing’s for sure – the brother’s unpredictability doesn’t cause the live audience to lose out. Their energy has its target, after all.

“I think we’ve always had the goal of making the shows fun – fun for us and fun for the people that are there – like a party,” says Jamin.

Jake echoes: “More than just watching a band play. We try to engage people.”