Party band’s hot sound in contrast to January cold

Lord knows, in these frosty depths of winter, anything that can help raise the spirits (and body temperatures) is most welcome. Which means Lovewhip couldn’t come to coastal Maine at a better time.

Blending Afro-Caribbean rhythms with elements of funk, punk and rock, Lovewhip is quite simply a party waiting to happen. And at 9:30 tonight the band promises to heat up the January night with its self-described “highlife juicy juju world booty pop” at Gilbert’s, 12 Bayview St. in Camden.

The band – Erin Harpe (Empress Erin), guitar and vocals; Jim Countryman (Juicy Jim) bass and vocals; Michael Potvin (DJ MicL PTVN), synth and sampler; and Art McConnell (Artilicious), drums – hails from Jamaica Plain, a deceptively exotic sounding place that is, in fact, a Boston neighborhood. Still, Lovewhip’s co-founder, Harpe, credits Jamaica Plain’s cultural diversity with providing some inspiration for the band’s eclectic sound.

“It’s an exciting place to be because people have their windows open and they’re playing merengue and salsa … and we’ve definitely been influenced by that,” Harpe explains. “Also radio down here, the radio stations are really diverse. There’s a lot of reggae, dance hall, merengue, salsa, Haitian music and all kinds of stuff. It definitely affected me to just want to play dance music.”

Harpe’s first love was the blues, however, and the twentysomething successfully folds her background as a solo Delta-style blues player into the Lovewhip mix as well.

Forming in the late ’90s, Harpe says the idea, at first, was to consciously pull the sounds around them into something that would make audiences want to move.

“We thought if we can take that music, take some influences from it, and mix it with rock and pop music and bring it to people,” Harp says, “they’re not going to necessarily know what the influences are, but we’d just have a band that was really going to make people dance, even people who don’t like to dance.”

With a 2004 Boston Music Award to its credit, the band will release a new full-length album, “Virtual Booty Machine,” on May 6. It will be the band’s fourth release on its own label, Juicy Juju Records.

Tickets for tonight?s show are $5, 21 and older only. For more information, contact Gilbert?s at 236-4320. For more on Lovewhip, visit www.lovewhip.net. George Bragdon can be reached at gbragdon@bangordailynews.net.