The Tea Club drinks it in

In September, the Tea Club will play ProgDay 2011, a sprawling outdoor progressive rock festival in Raleigh, N.C. After 10 years of perfectionism, inner strife and persistence, this South Jersey sextet is finally coming to the attention of metal fans outside of Philadelphia.

This weekend, the Club prepares for their outdoor spectacular with an intimate set at the Tritone.

“It took us a long time to realize that we needed to have some kind of a business mentality to make this work,” says Dan McGowan, who founded the band with his brother Patrick when he was just 15. “And, you know, that sucks, because we never wanted to be businessmen, we just wanted to play music. So we’re still learning.”

Dan and Patrick have written nearly all of the Club’s symphonic compositions. The pair confess to being raised on stacks of King Crimson, Yes and Genesis recordings (their father was a dedicated prog-head), and in their latest full-length, “Rabbit,” the brothers appear to be finding their own flavor of melodic metal within nine ambitious, lengthy tracks.

“We’re at the point now where it’s about having a vision — a vision for how we’re going to do this until we die,” says Patrick. “We’ve been doing this for a long time, and only now things are starting to come together for us. We were running in circles there for a while. I mean, we were teenagers, so we had a lot to figure out.”