"Would you mind scooting down a bit?" a girl approaching me asked as a line of people followed her into the pew I was sitting in. The entire pew filled up in a few seconds, and the rest of Berlin Chapel seemed to go from moderately full to bustling with people just as quickly. It was the evening of Saturday, Dec. 8, and the audience seemed to pack itself even tighter in anticipation of Steamy Winter, the semester show of Brandeis' all-male a cappella group, Voicemale.

In a few minutes, the group of six young men, wearing identical black suits, blue shirts and silver ties walked down the aisle of the chapel and positioned themselves in a semicircle at the front of the stage. Without a word, they started singing, and the audience fell into a wonderful state of captivation as their undivided attention shifted to the group. Brandeis students came out to show support for the group, but there were also a great many parents and family members eager to see their boys perform-there were even a few moms carefully holding up video cameras for the duration of the show. 

Voicemale's opening song, "Where's The Love," originally performed by Hanson, was powerfully rendered with great volume and charisma, as the singers shuffled and swayed, snapped their fingers to the timing of the music and smiled brightly. Because of the small size of the group this year, their performance was much more intimate, and each part had to be executed with more precision than would be required in a larger group. Voicemale is comprised of Jason Sugarman '13, Schuyler Brass '14, Dan Schreiber '14, Eli Siegel '14, Adam Jones '15 and their newest member Elan Wong '15. Besides hosting concerts like Steamy Winter each semester, the group is hard at work during the academic year with studio recording and traveling for competitions and performances. They are currently preparing to work on a new studio album to follow up their critically acclaimed album Phoenix, which was nominated for four Contemporary A Cappella Recording Awards, including Best Male Collegiate Album. 

Though the Steamy Winter show was generally a tame and polished performance, there was one song during which Voicemale completely cut loose and the audience roared with laughter and screams. That song was none other than the highly loved, yet mocked "What Makes You Beautiful" by One Direction. In preparation to perform it, they each threw off their black jackets and moved into a pyramid-shaped dance formation that all of us 90s children are used to seeing in early *NSYNC or Britney Spears music videos. The dance-choreographed by Emily Zoller '14-was hilarious. While the group translated One Direction's autotuned pop sound into a resonant, harmonic a cappella masterpiece, they were moving around the stage waving their arms and shaking their hips like a regular boy band.

While Voicemale's performance was obviously well-rehearsed, thoughtfully arranged and delivered with much enthusiasm, there were moments during which I thought there was room for improvement. As a genre, a cappella music usually features one soloist and a much larger number of singers providing 'instrumental' sounds and harmonies, which can sometimes drown the soloist's voice and make it difficult to discern the actual lyrics of a song. Because Voicemale consistently does an excellent job at maintaining a balance between the volume of the soloist and the rest of the group, the moments when the soloist was overpowered by the group were very apparent. On louder anthems like "Here We Go," originally performed by Dispatch, I would have liked to hear the soloist a bit better.

Steamy Winter also featured an impressive performance by the Chorallaries, the oldest coed a cappella group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While this is a much larger group than Voicemale, with 20 members compared to Voicemale's six, the two groups were quite matched in the quality of their performances. The Chorallaries performed three songs in the middle of the show, including a medley of Justin Bieber's "As Long As You Love Me." Possibly even more refreshing than their energetic performance was seeing that a group of students from an institution as intense at MIT can have enormous fun getting down to tweenage pop music.
Overall, Steamy Winter was everything it promised to be and more. As someone who is not involved in the world of a cappella, I was extremely impressed with the group dynamics that made Voicemale's performance so melodically cohesive and enjoyable to watch.