Athens, Ga., is pretty much synonymous with Southeastern left-of-center rock and pop — college rock, as we used to call it back when university radio stations sustained the underground.
R.E.M. The B-52's. Pylons. Love Tractor. The town's '80s-originated reputation as a mecca for quality music continued up through the '90s — think Five Eight, Olivia Tremor Control, Elf Power and, uh, Widespread Panic — to today's crop of hometown names, including Of Montreal, Southern Bitch, Jucifer, Bad Wizard and, perhaps most notably, Drive-By Truckers.
Athens' annual AthFest continues to draw fans from around the world; several of its local venues are legendary on the touring circuit; its very name is still one of a handful of non-metropolis monikers that automatically makes an up-and-coming band a little more worth looking into.
That's not the primary reason why the four members of exemplary pop outfit Modern Skirts found themselves there, though. They ended up in Athens for the other obvious reason why hip kids end up in college towns.
"We were all enrolled in [University of Georgia] at one point or another," explains Skirts bassist Phillip Brantley. "So that's kind of how we met. I came here basically because of Georgia's wonderful scholarship program."
Brantley and drummer John Swint grew up together in one rural Georgia 'burg, guitarist/vocalist Jay Gulley and pianist JoJo Glidewell in another. Like so many other young musicians, the two pairs were introduced by a mutual collegiate friend, and three years ago Modern Skirts began the time-honored tradition of playing to almost nobody for free beer — a tradition, it seems, that exists even in a "music town" like Athens.
"I don't know, there was lots of drinking and good times," Brantley remembers. "Then, we wrote a couple of songs that made us step back and say, 'We really like this, let's think about recording something.' We did a little EP, and that helped us out."
In its first couple of years, the band became one of the better-known open secrets of the Athens-Atlanta live-music axis. They found a manager in Nomad Artists' Troy Aubrey, who helped add a serious amount of credibility to the group's resume when he suggested that Modern Skirts' first self-produced full-length, Catalogue of Generous Men, be mixed by John Keane. In addition to playing drums on releases by such varied artists as Jermaine Jackson, Kenny G, Richard Marx and Don "Heartbeat" Johnson, Keane has engineered and contributed instrumentation to releases by Indigo Girls, Uncle Tupelo, R.E.M. and Billy Bragg, to name but a few.
"[Aubrey] just contacted him and said we would really like for him to mix," Brantley says. "It was a really great decision. I own several records that he had a hand in, and they were amazing to me. I was very thoroughly in awe of his work."
A lot of local bands' first albums sound like, well, some local band's first album. The overall volume is lower, the arrangements and dynamics less thought out, the tones less refined than a higher-budgeted effort. Catalogue of Generous Men, however, doesn't sound like that. It's a fully realized outing from such a young act, a patiently crafted, wholly wrought offering of piano- and guitar-driven pop songs, grounded in the genre's traditions but coming off as completely contemporary.
At turns melancholy and anthemic, classic and noisily edgy, the catchy, lyrically rich songs on Catalogue sound mature — in the sense of experienced musicians working confidently on time-honored turf — without sacrificing a fresh, original energy.
"It seems to me that one thing we always talk about is sticking in people's heads, but going at it in a way that's not obvious," says Brantley. "I think a lot of people listen to our songs and think it's just a really accessible pop band, and it's easy to digest. And I would agree, but I like it when people listen and say, 'These songs sound familiar, but when I really listen, there's more going on than what you hear at first.'
"We just try to make it interesting, as far as dynamics go, and definitely melody-centric."
The combination of classic-pop skills, strong lyrics and harmonies (Gulley, Glidewell and Brantley all contribute vocals, and often switch instruments in a live setting) and piano-anchored arrangements have garnered Modern Skirts a wealth of musical comparisons, from chamber-pop pioneers like Brian Wilson and old-school left-field pop mavericks like The Kinks to more recent acts. The band appreciates the compliments-by-association regardless of whether they perceive them as accurate, though a persistent one in particular always strikes the band as odd.
"Ben Folds is a comparison that baffles all of us," Brantley says with a laugh. "And I know it's because there's the piano, bass and drums element in a couple of the songs. But I really don't hear it in the melodies, and I don't hear it in the lyrics or the vocal qualities."
Catalogue of Generous Men was released in October of '05; since then, Modern Skirts have ridden an ever-increasing slow-burn of a buzz. They've been written up in national publications like Paste, and national websites like PopMatters.com. They've toured the eastern half of the country to positive reviews — in fact, Catalogue is still being discovered, and raved about, by critics more than a year after it dropped. And they've become somewhat enshrined in that legendary lineage of Athens bands, through playing shows with Drive-By Truckers and selling out those famous local venues — to crowds that have included Michael Stipe himself.
But for Brantley, the meeting of the four musicians who make up Modern Skirts, and the music that's resulted, might've happened anywhere.
"We're all fans of R.E.M.," he says. "Before I left high school, my senior English teacher gave me R.E.M.'s first two records for graduation, and I was just really blown away by those records. I've since come to really love their early catalog.
"We certainly love the scene and the many, many great bands that have come from here. But I don't think we're very influenced by what's happened here."
This article appears in Dec 13-19, 2006.
