Twilight Music
The Athens Twilight and Foundry Entertainment are proud to announce the line up for this year's Twilight Music Presented by the Georgia Theatre, slated for Friday, April 27. The music stage will be located at the top of the 200 block of College Avenue along Washington Street and will be free to the public.
Schedule:
| Easter Island | 6:15 PM |
| The B-53's | 7:30 PM |
| Modern Skirts | 9:00 PM |
Easter Island
Formed by brothers Ethan and Asher Payne in 2010, Easter Island creates panoramic, post-rock inspired dream pop. Behind the wall of towering drums, glassy guitars, and the forceful tide of synthesizers, hide soft-spoken melodies, tender harmonies, and understated musings on the subtle, yet visceral moments in life.
Often compared to sonic pioneers of the 90s and 00s, Explosions In Sky, My Bloody Valentine, Pedro The Lion, and Sigur Rós, Easter Island makes no compromise to explore unknown sonic territory, embodying the “feeling that you’d stumbled onto something great...knowing that you had a potential game changer in your hands” (Pop Matters).
In 2011, Easter Island’s “Proud” from the debut EP, Better Things, was featured on ABC’s Off The Map. The band is currently working on it’s follow up LP, to be released in late spring 2012.
The B-53's
Please check back for biography and photos.
Born of four hopeful rednecks and numerous misconceptions, Athens, GA's Modern Skirts crept onto the scene in 2005 with its piano-laden debut record, "Catalogue of Generous Men." The record was very well received, landing at #11 on Paste Magazines' 50 Best Albums of 2005. Pop Matters also praised the debut for its “impeccably structured, gorgeous pop”. After some marginal touring success around the South and several sold out shows at Athens’ legendary 40 Watt Club, Modern Skirts took to the road for two years. During that time, they gained a small but passionate following, while losing massive amounts of steam and developing a creeping ambivalence towards their initial musical output.
Please check back for biography and photos.
Modern Skirts
Born of four hopeful rednecks and numerous misconceptions, Athens, GA's Modern Skirts crept onto the scene in 2005 with its piano-laden debut record, "Catalogue of Generous Men." The record was very well received, landing at #11 on Paste Magazines' 50 Best Albums of 2005. Pop Matters also praised the debut for its “impeccably structured, gorgeous pop”. After some marginal touring success around the South and several sold out shows at Athens’ legendary 40 Watt Club, Modern Skirts took to the road for two years. During that time, they gained a small but passionate following, while losing massive amounts of steam and developing a creeping ambivalence towards their initial musical output.
Fearful of being pigeonholed as a piano-pop band, Modern Skirts began working on songs for a follow-up to "Catalogue of Generous Men." While penning this new material, the band scored a string of European dates in the summer of 2008, opening for R.E.M. in Amsterdam and playing at Glastonbury, Rock Werchter, and London‘s O2 Wireless Festival. These massive shows would ultimately prove to be fruitless and forgettable, save for their inclusion here. Modern Skirts would soon return to the studio with David Lowery (Cracker) and Mike Mills (REM) handling production duties. "All of Us in Our Night" was the resulting effort that climbed its way to #22 on the CMJ charts. Darker and more electronic than its predecessor, "All of Us in Our Night" was lauded by Under the Radar as “one of the indie albums of 2009”. It was also heralded by Pitchfork as "bloodless, hermetic," and "not as good as the first one".
Still falling short of finding a truly unique and singular voice, the boys in Modern Skirts discovered something startlingly fresh in singer Jay Gulley’s bedroom recordings and immediately began work on their self-approached and self-produced third record, using these demos as a template. The band threw out the conventional procedures of recording they had encountered in previous sessions and began innovating their approach to capturing the songs on tape. The new material maintained the clever melodic and arrangement sensibilities of earlier recordings, but something more unique began to show itself as the songs actualized. After four decadent and dangerous weeks in New Orleans, "Gramahawk" was complete.
In the spirit of building excitement for the upcoming "Gramahawk," the band mastered and released a collection of the original bedroom recordings digitally and with limited hand pressings as the "Happy 81" EPlast July. Despite a significant shift in focus, the record was warmly received by fans and critics alike, "a spectacular display of lo-fi pop with a real raw power to entertain" as fensepost.com cheerfully proclaimed.
"Gramahawk" reintroduces Modern Skirts as a band honest to their musical tastes and to their desire to create and perform both intellectually crafted and inherently catchy songs. Perhaps the most striking aspect of the record, though, is the insight into Gulley's dark, imaginative and humorous brain. A song about Gulley's second DUI, an ode to 80's one hit wonder Jane Child, and a stomping, aggressive mantra about taking off his date's top while being serenaded by a Mariachi band are just the beginning. There is a gleeful and twisted pop evil afoot here.
