that's gotta be another modlins milestone

with the addition of a few more songs / the latest bounces, i am no longer able to burn all of the new material to just one cd. oh yea.

also as we are putting the finishing touches up on these new tunes, we are also putting the finishing touches on what should be quite a nice weekend in the middle of June, taking us Modlins, along with our great friends Hot TV, up to San Francisco and Sacramento, with a stop in Los Angeles as well! hmm, and on that note, maybe the milestone is not the physical impossibility of fitting the new stuff on just one cd, but that i just made the longest run-on sentence ever? and i almost did it again!

in any case, the plan is to hand our album(s)-on-a-hard-drive off to Hot TV's / Where Does It End? -producer Mark Bertuldo tomorrow at their show at Pehrspace in LA. after that, maybe we'll have time to throw together at least one or two of the music video ideas floating around? or maybe just try and figure out how much of these songs we actually remember how to play live...

stay tuned for Modlins shows in june and july!

cheers

al

three more down

hit the practice space recording studio at 1pm. eric brought 1 22oz of his first round of home brew, plus the Wilco Tango Foxtrot from lagunitas (as seen on pitchfork), and Pliny The Elder. at 330pm arlene was kind enough to bring snacks, plus a few more stellaaaaa. Best.soccer practice.ever.



i left a bit after 5pm, while the others stuck around to tie up more loose ends. good times.

a year ago, this past weekend

a year ago, this past weekend, we Modlins were on the road through the Pacific Northwest, in anticipation of the release of Where Does It End?. now one year later, some videos have surfaced from that trip, and since the ones from our show at the Red Room in PDX were particularly nice, here they are :

It's Out of Your Hands, Chuck Berry


Where Does It End?


Monday Morning

Meet me at the Oakquinox...

Or, well, don't meet us there, 'cause 3 out of 4 Modlins will be at Coachella that weekend, but if your cup of tea is in fact NOT Coachella, and rather barrel-aged beer with names like "Grand Teton Oak Aged Lost Continent Double IPA", then this must be for you. Green Flash Super Freak? yes please. At "the celestial union of beer and wood", what's not to like? http://www.stoneworldbistro.com/oakquinox/

(there were just too many pun possibilities to let this go entirely unnoticed)

tomorrow @ the Che Cafe : Swim Party + Writer

you know how time flies? we Modlins first played with our friends in Swim Party at Buster Daly's (now known as U-31 for all youngin's) on November 19th, 2005, and have had the honor of rocking stages with them quite a few times since then, including the cd release party for our first full-length Here's To Being Happy, and LA release show for the followup With Friends Like These. and Writer was kind enough to join us for our most recent Where Does It End? cd release show. now tomorrow night, the two of them join forces to rock the Che Cafe, all ages style. will we see any repeats from their split 7" release show? we can only hope! its a good thing Modlins only practice on tuesdays and thursdays...

saturday update #2?

yet another successful saturday session tying up lose ends, as I met eric and matt at our practice room studio to lay down bass for This Is The End and Tell Me What I Should Do. now its off to run errands before meeting up with Stoph at the 2nd ever Wii Olympics, where the nation of Almerica has high hopes for going golden in Archery and Wakeboarding, and defending its gold in the Ski Jump, while eric is still hard at work recording guitar parts, or maybe just hanging out with matt in the practice space. who knows what goes on in there when Stoph and I are gone. ha. then if we can get a good take of White Lies (Modern Lovers), record the intro to The Hunt for Red November (as heard/seen at both of our shows last month), and get Stoph to lay down hi-hat on Benefit of Doubt, we just might have some new versions of a whole lot of new material next weekend. pretty exciting! (oh yea, i just name dropped like 5 new Modlins songs)

another day, another round of recording

stoph and matt are still at our practice room studio, while eric is at a wedding and i am about to leave for the Stone Brewery, but in the mean time, here is a quick picture of matt in action...



and another shot of matt and i in action, from last month's Casbah show...



cheers!

5 Years of Modlins!

Yes yes, today is the today. Or rather, 5 years ago today was a day, a day that shall live in infamy. Wait, no. Anyways, what DID happen 5 years ago today was The Modlins' album release party for The Andrew EP, at which it was announced that I, Alex Smith, was officially the fourth Modlin. So today is the 5 year birthday party of this group of four of us known as The Modlins.

At practice yesterday, Stoph said we should come up with a quiz that noone will be able to answer, but that seems like a lot of work. Instead, here is my mp3 mix of songs from each Modlins release from the past 5+ years, in reverse-chronological order :

1/ The Mark EP - O, What to Believe!
2/ Where Does It End? - Monday Morning
3/ With Friends Like These - Warm Up (Or Say Goodbye)
4/ Here's To Being Happy - Thirty-Seven, Japanese
5/ The Michael EP - Waiting To Wake Up
6/ The Andrew EP - What You Had In Mind
7/ The Daniel EP - Please Shirely

Download the full mix (zip)

great success

friday at the casbah was hugely great. stoph took lots of pictures which i think you can find on facebook, but also might need an fb account to see. arlene also took pictures, and a few video clips, but then she left my camera in her parents' car, so maybe we'll get it back in another few weeks. ha. anyways, its almost like taking a break from live shows to work on new material, and then taking a break from recording that new material to play a few live shows, is a balancing act that we Modlins seem to finally be getting down. a balancing act...

getting back in to the swing of things

get it? like tiger tiger woods, y'all? too soon? anyways, we Modlins took a vote, and the group consensus is for us to start blogging again. like hey, if its good enough for CatDirt, its good enough for us, right? anyways, a lot has gone down since our last post, on June 10 2009. We played another 10 shows between June and August of last year, and I got engaged! And then we Modlins played one more in October before going in to hibernation for the winter. And by hibernation, I mean we are working on super secret new material. just to give you a bit of a teaser, some of the working titles we are throwing around are "that one song where matt plays the organ", "that other song where matt plays the piano", "the one where eric plays the organ", "stoph's song (even though matt came up with the chord changes, lyrics, and structure)", and "Please Bear With Me ('cause I'm Not Lion)".

anyways, we came out of hiding two weeks ago to pack the Tin Can Alehouse alongside longtime role models (is that the right term?) Billy Midnight. and tonight, we are going to rock the Casbah, playing with the likes of Joel P West, The Hot Moon, and Dead Oceans' The Donkeys! Hard to believe it's been over a year since we played The Donkeys, and also like a year and a half since we were at the Casbah. Well i guess since it'd also been some 8 months in between blog posts, maybe it all makes sense now...



correction: i was wrong, last casbah show prior to this one was 7/18/09. only 9 months ago...