Local band releases stunning full-length debut

How to go

What: This Love “At War” album release show

When: Saturday; doors open at 6 p.m.

Where: Northridge Lions Club, 4590 Derr Road

Admission: $8

SPRINGFIELD — Years from now, the generation that grew up post-9/11 will have to tell their own kids the tale of how they met.

They’ll talk of meeting on MySpace — then actually meeting at a local show at Forever Sports by Callahan and 12 different opening bands.

Mom immediately thought Dad was cute because they were wearing the same kind of jeans and the same size, too.

And the way his hair swooped down over one eye was really hot.

Inevitably, this is where the kids start to snicker.

Jake Bonham can only hope that a future story involving his year-old new band, This Love, won’t involve any snickering at all.

The former Callahan guitarist would rather This Love stand the test of time than be defined by one particular moment in time.

The local band — Springfielders Bonham, Jake Sims and Jake Rinehart on guitar, bass and drums, respectively, and Joe McFaddin, of Huber Heights, on lead vocals and lead guitar — has just released a stunning full-length debut, “At War.”

An album release show is set for Saturday night at the Northridge Lions Club.

It’s clear from the Beach Boy harmonies that soar over an opening sound bite of Bobby Kennedy eulogizing Martin Luther King Jr. that this is a band with a potentially long national career ahead of it.

Even though they’re unsigned, This Love got off to the most promising of starts last summer when the Journeys shoe store chain picked up the video for “Like a Million Lights,” a track off the band’s initial EP, and played it every hour in every single store nationwide for three months.

“We’re not trying to be anything,” Bonham explained recently. “Callahan was really trying to be something. It was really about fitting into something.”

That something was the local emo scene — something that now seems as quaint as a MySpace profile with sparkly wallpaper and a My Chemical Romance song immediately blasting as soon as the page loads.

It’s no longer about “dressing like this or wearing your hair like that,” as Bonham put it.

This Love merely represents the difference between being 17 and being 21.

“I feel like a completely different person now than when I was in Callahan,” said Bonham, a 2008 Catholic Central grad. “I guess you just grow from 17 to 21. Your mind-set totally changes.”

At war

That’s plainly evident on “At War,” a concept album — uh-huh, a concept album — that sounds like a pop-punk band’s soundtrack to a movie made in CinemaScope.

The hooks are still intact, but this is a band that now approaches music with a very wide lens.

Lyrically and musically, the end result can only be described as epic.

McFaddin’s bluesy guitar work alone ups the ante, but then they went and even hired themselves a choir.

With McFaddin wailing and the choir wailing, too, the album’s climatic song, “Alive,” will give you chills.

In fact, this might just be the finest album ever made by a local band.

“We wanted to push ourselves extra hard,” said Bonham, who still works for the time being at the Best Buy on Bechtle Avenue.

As Bonham recalls, the group’s grand plans were laid last fall after they watched the 1988 U2 documentary “Rattle and Hum.”

“They were filming in this church with this gospel choir,” he said. “We were like, ‘Yeah, we’ve got to get a choir.’ At first it started as a joke. ‘Let’s get a choir.’ Then it became, ‘Why not? What’s stopping us from getting a choir?’ ”

The choir from Kenton Ridge High School appears on three tracks.

No joke.

“It was a huge undertaking,” Bonham said.

The video for the band’s lead single, “Free,” hit the web this week as well.

So what ever became of Callahan, you ask?

Technically, This Love is — or at least was — Callahan, the Springfield band once named the “unsigned band of the month” by Alternative Press.

“Callahan,” Bonham said, “had a perfect place in my life.”

Only he and Sims remain.

“Once Joe stepped in,” Bonham said, “it was a completely different everything.”

In addition to the partnership with Journeys, the Hot Topic chain last summer snatched up This Love’s EP, “The Beginning,” for its stores nationwide, allowing the band to buy a van outright for touring.

The website AbsolutePunk also tagged This Love in its list of “Absolute 100 bands you need to know.”

“I don’t feel like I’m in a high school band anymore,” Bonham said. “I feel like we’re a working machine. Before, it was that awkward time when you’re supposed to be in college.”

Still, that doesn’t mean a guy’s mom should stop worrying.

“My mom worries about me,” Bonham confessed. “I told her, ‘I can’t promise you that we’ll be the next big thing, ever. I can promise you I’ll be able to live off of music.’”

Contact this reporter at amcginn@ coxohio.com.