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SHENECA SHARPE
Staff Writer
Premium Blend rocked the stage once again with its Spring Showcase featuring Call4Backup. Premium Blend, doing what it does best, started off with slow melodies then went into strong vocals emulating popular songs, while giving them a slight Premium Blend twist. The group’s vocal cohesion could successfully blow away any first time listener.
The audience could tell from the chemistry on stage it wasn’t presented as a club anymore, but more so as a family. Especially with some seniors graduating this May, Premium Blend made sure to say goodbye with a killer performance.
“As a freshman you don’t feel super involved in things, so when you join something as tight knit as an a capella group, they start to feel like your family,” said junior Micayla Greco who majors in musical theatre.
From the audience perspective, it definitely felt as if someone crashed a family reunion BBQ and it was completely okay with it, inviting the outsiders in to watch. Some of the popular songs that were sung were “Shake it Out” by Florence and the Machine, performed by Greco with Premium Blend right behind her following her lead.
At the start of the show, Call4Backup performed a couple of songs to open up for Premium Blend. Call4Backup is a group affiliated with Nazareth College that was founded in 1998. One singer that caught everyone’s attention with her strong voice was Mahalie Lissade.
“I’ve been singing ever since I can remember. I’ve been singing in church when I was younger, I sing around different events around my campus, and other party events as well. So, to be quite honest, I just love singing,” said Lissade, a senior dual major in education and psychology.
With the cheering and applause from the audience members, it showed how much they were in awe of Call4Backup’s combination of voices. With the crowd all riled up from the first group, it became an almost natural progression to move on to the Premium Blend’s amazing voices.
Even though it was a small setting, junior music education major Whitney Hackman showed the audience that size has nothing to do with her powerful, yet soft voice. As president of Premium Blend, she knows the hard work her members put in to make every performance amazing, no matter the size of the audience.
“We rehearse so much together and we get to know each other’s voices [and] also knowing each other’s personalities. It’s really nice because it really creates a great performances every time,” said Hackman.
During all of the performances, there was a slideshow in the background of silly photos or photos of them at different performances. It gave the audience a good chuckle right before the show started.
One of the things that most people noticed with Premium Blend’s performance was that there was always a constant amount of movement with the group with every song. With “Trumpets” by Jason Derulo, the singers pretended they had trumpets for hands going along with the beat. This made the performance way more fun and enjoyable to watch instead of so serious and uptight.
This Spring Showcase showed the versatility of the group and its ability to work with other groups such as Call4Backup. It was a great way to say goodbye to soon graduates in the group.