On the road again!

The Album release is behind us ..... and what an amazing one it was. Huge thanks go out to Writer (especially Jayme for helping out with the drum "marching line") and to Hot TV (esp Tim for similar reasons). also, thanks to Tyler from The Exfriends for rounding out the drumline. and to Dayna and Joe for forming our first horn section. and a debt of gratitude most likely never to be fully repaid to Mark Bertuldo for being awesome. it was an incredible night, thanks to everyone who came out. Thanks to Rosey and Natalie, our local music blog heavyweights, mingling admist the crowd. and thanks to Tim Pyles for giving the title track Where Does It End? a some spins the last couple of weeks on fm 94/9. and of course thanks to the Whistlestop for being the proud sponser of "the modlins release another recording".

If you weren't able to make it out and pick up a copy of the new record, we should have the online ordering section up soon. but until then, we're hitting the road so catch us around california. We'll be in SF (sat 6/13), Sactown (fri 6/12), LA (sat 6/20) and one last show in June in san diego with The Minor Keys at the always lovely beauty bar (sun 6/21). Flyers above, love below.

love,
the modlins (xoxo)

one chord to another

looks like our trip up to Olympia, WA and back was all that more nice, as i saw today that there has been some good love for The Modlins on Olympia's 89.3fm KAOS , during their One Chord To Another show, Monday nights at 9pm.

According to their oc2a blog, the first our of this past Monday June 1st's show was "Tonight" by Jason Anderson, Jeremy Egnik's "Life's Too Short", Connor Oberst & The Mystic Valley Band "Slowly (Oh So Slowly)", The Modlins "Bad Night's Sleep", Camera Obscura "You Told Me A Lie", Grizzly Bear "Southern Point", John Vanderslice "Sunken Union Boat", Built To Spill "Kicked It In The Sun", Silversun Pickups "The Royal We", and Spiritualized "I Think I'm In Love". That is not bad company at all.

Where Does It End? - Album Details, Full Tracklist

the albums are in our possession and ready for distribution. And this friday will be the long fabled release show of our third album, who's tracklist we've yet to disclose to you. let us remedy that now:

The Modlins - Where Does It End?
1. Where Does It End?
2. Pink Parachutes
3. Monday Morning
4. Blue Balloons
5. Well, What's It Gonna Take?
6. Marching Line, 1945
7. It's All Gonna Blow Over, Soon (Positively 4th Ave.)
8. O, Diana
9. Will You Wait for the Chance
10. Wait in Your Words
11. The Birds of Manhattan (reprise)

see you friday!!!! (and if you're unclear on what's going on, look down a couple posts, you should find some flyers)

(note: monday morning and the b-side "it's out of your hands, chuck berry" are streaming on myspace now ..... in case you read this blog, but somehow missed that bit of news)

Where Does It End? tours more than we do...

tracking on UPS is great, since it looks like we'll actually have the shipment of lots of new cds, potentially tomorrow, with plenty of time to spare before next Friday (see you at the Whistle Stop!). but at the same time, it kind of makes me feel like a bum. i mean, here it is the end of May, and we Modlins have so far played in 5 states this year: CA, OR, WA, AZ, and NM : but our cds have already been in 4 states, just over the past 15 hours! i guess all i can say is, Where Does It End?

The Modlins in "Where Does It End?"

by renny rhanor - click to enlarge

swim party on fuel tv

videos reposted from sddialedin, but still... well done, fellas, well done.

Where Does It End? - CD Release Show

loudspeaker love

driving back from spending mothers day up in irvine, wolf parade's At Mount Zoomer ended just in time for us to switch over to 91x Loudspeaker and catch them playing "Dragging My Feet". actually, it went more like "wait, why does this song sound familiar? how do i know this song? the singer sounds kind of like Matt, but with more reverb... holy crow, its Dragging My Feet! quick, you text message and i'll keep driving!" and lucky for me, arlene was riding passenger, so that whole previous conversation was only about 80% in my brain, and the other 20% was i(n) r(eal) l(ife). even got a shoutout where the 91x DJ refered to myspace.com/themodlins and even talked about our next show, 6/5 at the whistlestop! so the only question is, did we forget to send them a copy of the Monday Morning single? good times!

we're back!

3 shows in 3 cities split between 2 states (neither of which was good ol' California), covering some 1700+ miles in The Hulk / Shrek / Bruce Banner / whatever name you want to give our mini van. and now we are back at home, or, three of us are, as eric had to fly out to somewhere north of Detroit for work this week. so the rest of us can take a bit of time to unwind, and get ready for June 5th! also, we kept track of all the cds we listened to un the trip (i think the grand total was 34?) , and i'm thinking that maybe i'll post the list, and make a contest out of it, where if you (assuming You were not actually in the van the whole way with us) can figure out who picked what cd, i might just give you a copy of Where Does It End? sometime around that June 5th release show. yea! ... though i didn't run that idea past other modlins, so this is assuming it doesn't get vetoed / held back in the bureaucracy.

ooh, and on the last bit of the drive back in to SD, we were able to catch our buddies Rob and Jake of Apes Of Wrath on air with Tim Pyles last night, and may 8th at the casbah looks nice. real nice. and i suppose thats as good a transition as any to wish Mr Pyles a happy bday.

ok back to work.

new single "Monday Morning", Soda Bar 4/25

with the album nearly finished, we're getting the first single out as fast as humanly possible! at our upcoming Soda Bar show (this saturday, 4/25) ... we'll have an extremely limited number (44 copies) available for ... FREE!! that's right, get our new single (complete with b-side "it's out of your hands, chuck berry") for $0. it's streaming right now on myspace, so check it out, and if you want to snag a copy arrive early (though you should probably do that anyway, as we're on first)

unable to make the show but want to get a copy, don't fret. we'll have details soon about how you can sign up for our mailinglist and get a free digital download of the single. stay glued to the blog for the deets.

and don't forget, mark your calendars for Friday 6/5 .... "Where Does It End?" CD Release show with Writer .... epic.

look! finally uploading video from february...

that is me attempting to make a youtube playlist containing the videos i'm (finally) uploading that Matt took via eric's camera, during our last recording session with Deborah (and Mark) at Signature Sound. granted the recording session took place on 2/14, and it is now 4/6, but hey, better late than never, right?

also, the first video clip matt took was 12 minutes long, and youtube has a 10 minute limit, so i'll need to cut it in half, or take out 2 minutes, before i can upload that, which is why the first clip up there starts at "part 2"

shows shows shows

We Modlins have a bit of a break from playing, until our show with Roxy Jones, LA's The Happy Hollows, and The Dimes (from the PDX) at the Soda Bar on Saturday April 25th. But while we are catching our collective breath, it looks like the rest of San Diego is blowing up? yo? here's just a taste:

tues apr 7 : The Howls, Gray Ghosts, Joel P West, Longstay @ the Casbah
thur apr 9 : Republic of Letters & Finding Fiction @ Bar Pink
fri apr 10 : Writer, The Knew, & Tape Deck Mountain @ the Ken Club
sat apr 11 : Apes of Wrath, Da Bears, Chaz, Valley Arena @ the Che Cafe
wed apr 15 : while we tentatively have scheduled our final mixing session for album #3, there is also Apes of Wrath, Roxy Jones, and Transer @ Soda Bar
thur apr 16 : Scarlet Symphony, The Art, & Braaiins @ Soda Bar
fri apr 17 : Wavves, Christmas Island, The Dabbers, Bipolar Bears, DJ Mario Orduno @ the Casbah
sat apr 18 : Writer, Calico Horse, Menomena @ the Casbah

oh its good to be back home.

coincidence?

upon closer inspection, there are 88 albums in my itunes that have exactly 14 tracks on them. my birthday is on august 8th. if that means i should not add any more albums with 14 tracks on to my itunes, then i think it invalidates the email i just sent to Matt Eric and Stoph. and that would probably mean that the mysterious song known as "It's Out of Your Hands, Chuck Berry" will once again be back on the chopping block...

we made it!

got back to the practice space at (i think) 12:07am, after leaving Portland at 620am yesterday morning, taking del taco to go from Redding CA for lunch, and in-n-out to go in Kettleman City for dinner. i took over the driving reigns at the gas station in Ashland, OR, and drove all the way to Kettleman City, only to be given the golden handshake as matt took the van that might be known as The Hulk(ster) the rest of the way home. so close to having driven the entire length of California on my own, but what can you do. i'll let the other guys give the final list of how many cds we went through over the drive, and what 3 states' license plates we failed to see (yes, we kept track of seeing plates from 47 states + 4-ish canadian provinces + baja). so just a quick shoutout to Qwong, The Tanked, Mr Joy Boy, You Yell You Kick, and Whiskey Goat, plus Eugene City Brewing, Amnesia Brewing, and McTarnahans, for a wonderful weekend. ok back to work...

This hole i've dug is mine forever

(*this picture used w/o permission, if i should take it down, let me know and i will, but anyone reading this you can find the picture here: http://explodingdog.com/title/thisholeivedugisminefor.html, and go there and buy something)

phew, with all that legality out of the way, i'm reminded of this exploding dog (the website, not the animal) picture from back in college (circa '02). This seems to be where we're at, and embody the state of the album.

Last night the originally planned final session wasn't quite that, but was still a very productive headway maker on the last changes of the songs. Consequently though, that means we've still got a bit more work to due and with the impending deadline (and the now already planned release date) we're in super crunch mode. we've got a show in LA tonight, a day to get our heads on straight and then we leave for the oregon trails. while we're out our producer-extrodinaire Mark (and pretty much the only friend we see) will be handling the horns duties and getting those sounding good on the songs. our sunday session went real well, dayna was super nice and did a great job with the parts (and I also know, if i want horns on a song, i shouldn't write it in B. Bb would've been fine, or C ... but of course, bull's eye on the terrible "nearly-all-sharps" key ... great work eric!)

anyway, the album is coming .. it's almost done ... and really, we're very excited about it. sadly some of the songs are gonna get cut, we'll see how it pans out, but there's no way all that we've recorded can make the album. but we'll find someway to get the discarded tracks out.

also, consequently, this uberbusyness has caused us to miss some great shows. We wanted to roll over to the casbah last night to catch Joanie and the boys but that didn't pan out. Red Pony Clock's return to the Habitat=missed. Writer's had a few shows around town now that i've been unable to catch and i forgot to buy tickets for the Luce Loft show on wed. so another strike against us. *sigh* .... i swear when all this is said and done, we're having a pizza party. until then .... the modlins are in the hole we dug for ourselves.

quick update

a quick, quick update late in the afternoon this fine thursday .... where are we at?

for those anxiously waiting (please let there be a few of you out there) we've got our hands in many pots right now. we've resumed practices at our rehearsal space and so that we can be ready to road test a few of the new songs on tour, most likely long beach will get the first glimpse of some of the new material. we've been consistently staying up til about 12:30pm each night working and reworking mixes. a final mix session with our head sound engineer kyle slated for next Monday, with currently no studio in our price range to house the session .... this should be interesting. a word document 17 pages long (and growing!) with tentative fixes, new rerecords, ideas and bad puns. another horn session schedule in covina for sunday (pre-lbc) with a trumpet player named dayna (and if she turns out to be the same dayna that shares her name with dayna's vegan special [holla! torpasta!] i'm gonna be stoked). a hometown show to kick off the tour at Radio Room Saturday Night (be there or be absent!). seriously, i think it's coming to an end (famous last words). we're gonna start scouting some mastering locations in the next week or so, we've got some time to sit on the final mixes. first drafts of the artwork from Patrick came in last week (or was it early this week) and they look sweet. kinda reminds me of The Exfriends "Joy Of Life" except sans band, and it's all painted. and there's .... ah, you'll see.

so yeah ..... we're busy .... and we'll have MUCH MORE to unveil in the coming weeks/months.... but more than anything else, mark your calendars for June 5th ... CD Release @ The Whistlestop in South Park (host of our last 2 CD releases) ..... we're finally playing with our good friends Writer (who've been bloggin' up a storm on their tour out to SXSW) .... it's going to be .... wait for it .....

... legendary.

the modlins are coming ....

spring 09 northwest tour

here's that poster alex was talking about ..... click to enlage

prowess

so last night before eric and mark headed over to meet up with roy, gabe and chicken at The Habitat, and before matt and i got to work fine-tuning more vocals and making it so noone will ever know i messed up the bass part at 1 min 56 seconds in to [insert super secret song title here], there was a discussion on the word "prowess". actual, it wasn't really a discussion as much as it was a sentence, a sentence saying that the word "prowess" is only really ever used in either the context of superheroes, or immediately following the word "sexual". what does that have to do with anything? who knows. what i do know is that i just finished updating the left column of this blog : The Modlins are coming... : with the next 7 shows, all of which happen before the end of this month of March!

yes, the Modlins are coming to The Radio Room here in San Diego, The Que Sera in LBC, The Knitting Factory Hollywood, and then we go up, up to the Red Room in the PDX, Eugene's Black Forest, Olympia WA's LeVoyeur, back to the PDX for Mississippi Pizza, and then back home. Sadly, we are skipping NorCal entirely because apparently, noone wants us there. Oh well. With friends like these, you know?

Or something. Poster coming soon?

props to Crocodiles

we are (slowly) moving towards what might be considered the start of finishing touches on album 3, which might actually have a name before it comes out, and getting ready for a tour up the west coast in a few weeks. on a similar level (or something), Skull Kontrol reports that The Crocodiles are going to be opening for The Faint in April and May. nice.

Swim Party & Writer - Split 7" Release

let's see ... Swim Party + Writer + Whistlestop + 7" release = SUPER AWESEOME. seriously, it's shows like this that make me really hate my job. unless you're gonna be freezing your ass off in Erie Pennsylvania, you best be making your way out to the Whistlestop next Friday 2/27.


i miss having a social life.

Don't Pass Us By

with the weekend gone ..... and another successful recording session under our belts, we turn the heat up and trudge on full steam ahead this week with recording, with the exception of a short session over at The Habitat, we'll be doing the rest from our house, so it's all up to us now.

here's a little something for all those readers out there, the audio's a little shoddy, but hey, we had fun. this was the end of the day on saturday, al gave his camera to renee to record Don't Pass Me By at the end of saturday. enjoy!



p.s. i'm sure Al knows the slick way to embed this and make it nice. if so, please do, but i figured the link would work just as well for now.

Happy Friday the 13th

(photo taken from SD:Dialed In Rosie's recap of Modlins + Exfriends @ Whistlestop, friday the 13th of April, 2k7)

and now, another poster to scare you. and by scare, i mean please.



yippee cay ay yay! Friday the 20th of February, 2009!

Where Does It End?!

so i just checked and the last time i updated this blog was back in november, coincidentally (or not coincidentally) regarding the same subject matter .... yes, the modlins third album.

originally when i thought to start up the blog i thought it would be something great to update daily, or fairly daily, discuss the goings on within the band, put up pictures and what not. oh, how overly optimistic and naive young eric was. now, only a tad bit older, i realize "daily blog posts" is on par with TPS reports to your boss. talking about the slow progress, mistakes, days off that you needed but probably shouldn't have taken ....

i just read the 33 1/3 book for Belle and Sebastian's "If you're feeling sinister" and it was very warming (i highly recommend it, but first get the Neutral milk hotel one), but also very depressing. to know that Tigermilk was recorded in 3 days, and If you're feeling sinister in 8, truly is impressive. And now that our album is going on 7 months, you start to wonder if we've done something wrong. Granted Stuart had dedicated time in a studio to do it, and had been flushing the songs out for years on his own, but anyway .... though a lot of people have complained about production on B&S's early recordings, in reality the songs speak for themselves and i'm sure many people (myself included) cite them as some of the best records in my collection. so it's no surprise that i would start to have doubts about our own recording endeavors.

but i really think, when all is said and down, my doubts will be washed away by a truly great finished product, one that we just can't seem to get out fast enough to .. you. whoever "you" maybe. though in the middle/end of last year when work began on this record, we worked on it only occasionally, and most often were just messing around with the songs in our practice space while constantly playing shows around town, nowadays, the amount of work i spend on the album rivals my day job. recording additional percussion, reworking harmonies, rewriting songs. i mean, hell ... one of the songs in contention now has it's own reprise. We've been trying to put off shows, but the occasional one comes in that you can't turn down (Beauty Bar 3rd anniv w/ Darker my Love anyone?). But when i'm not at work (or traveling for work, damn you Erie, PA), Matt and I are holed up in my room or the upstairs hallway constantly reworking and overthinking every choice. all the while, attempting not to piss off our girlfriends or our roommates (Sixto's usually at work, but man .. Kevin, that guys a trooper)

something i should've mentioned awhile back, but has slipped my mind, is that Stoph, Matt, and myself sat down with our friends Spencer and Dan (of Specific Oceans, not Wolf Parade) to discuss the album. i don't know exactly how to get to it, but if you go to iTunes, you can find a link to podcasts somewhere and in there you can look up Specific Oceans, and there should be something about an interview with The Modlins regarding our third album. we even gave them some exclusive sneak cuts of a couple unfinished tracks, so i guess for that alone it's worth checking out.

Anyway, Though I can't really say what the album will look like in the end, i can say we're truly giving it our all this time, even more so than in past efforts. We owe a great debt to our friend Mark (who i know we've mentioned before, and we'll probably keep mentioning til the album is released) but he's been staying on the ball, keeping a list, checking it twice, and ensuring that everything on the songs is there for a reason, and any fat we can trim is.

So where are we at? when will we be done?

well, we're really hoping for a release in May still (hopefully at some point before we said we were shooting for May and not earlier), but it could be as late as end of June. but i promise it won't come after that for two reasons. One, I would like this LP to get submitted to the San Diego Music Awards (cutoff is usually june 30th). it'd be nice to be nominated three years in a row for our three albums. and Two, because if we enter July ... our first session for this album was July '08, which means we will have been working on the album, on and off, for an entire year ... and that just is horribly depressing. Though we could make excuses about all having day jobs, vacations, responsibilities, lives outside the band, the fact of the matter is, it shouldn't take a year to make a pop record (or any record for that matter)

... so anyway, thanks for being patient, tell your friends. as for the next few months, well, because we don't understand how to stop playing shows while we work on a record, we're doing a tour up the coast, getting as far as Olympia, WA before heading back down. Portland, Eugene ... cause, why not ... we've got time.

so hope to see you out there, stick with us, it's gonna get really good.

cheers! off to band practice.

oh yeah, we have a recording session schedule for valentine's day ... how very maudlin of us.

in the meantime

first, happy groundhogs day? word on the street is groundhog saw its shadow, so there is more winter, which i can only take to mean that we get more weeks of 85 degree heat here in sunny san diego, before it officially becomes "summertime". that said, themodlins.com is having all sorts of issues right now which i am blaming entirely on iPower the hosting company, so in the meantime, here's the picture i took with my cell phone at the end of runthrough yesterday morning before our Beauty Bar show last night, of the setlist for said show.



other than that, i thought the show was most excellent. the Beauty Bar is always fun, Marshall does an awesome job manning the sound boards (this time it even made Arlene's ears ring, which she said might be a first for Modlins shows), free 3Olives vodka tonics (or whatever the drinks Jess and Stoph brought me were) helped, and the icing on the cake had to be the opening act. See, the two texts I got from former roommates were "Damn! Sorry but not going to make it." and "Everyone bailed on me", which made the fact that The Caburlesque Kittens performed for a bit before we took the stage all the sweeter (spiting those who could have been there, but weren't).

in other modlin news, the only news is that Eric is off on a work trip again, i think in Erie, PA, and work on album #3 continues...

sweet monkey, tell me this isn't awesome

so i was ocd-ly going through all my mp3s and copying and pasting album art out of amazon for all the albums that didn't already have album art, so it'll all be there nicely on my new ipod, right? and i saw i didn't have cover art for Loverlee's Musical Chairs. and then the questions came:

they have their music on amazon.com?

are the modlins on amazon.com?

and then

i found this



now tell me that isn't awesome

tonight

did the blog title fool you? no? anyways, new Franz Ferdinand album out today. and on that note, i'll also take the opportunity to recommend Lala.com. you can stream full albums straight from there, including Tonight. yes, you read it here: stream Tonight, for free, today!

and as a quick update, while you're listening to Tonight, tonight...



... sorry, couldn't help it. anyways, while you're listening, tonight, to Tonight, i'll be heading to the killian-sheridan abode to (try and) record better backup vocals for a few more songs for album #3! moving right along...

happy bday, annie

what better birthday present for your little sister turning... how old are you? ... 23? yea, that sounds about right... anyways...

what better bday present for your sister's 23rd bday than a free show with The Modlins, Darker My Love (from LA), a whole mess of most excellent DJs, and a hosted bar sponsored by Three Olives vodka?



ok, maybe you might think it might be better if the show wasn't on a school night, but hey, it wasn't like i invented the Julian calendar. i'm just working with what i got. happy monday.

a haiku of questions for tomorrow

does matt have to work?
715pm start?
can i eat dinner?

the ruby room vs the radio room

happy new year! ... only 5 days late ... anyways, yes, 2009 is here, and for no particular reason except for my own personal benefit, i will set out once and for all to remember the difference between 2 "new" San Diego venues, The Ruby Room and The Radio Room. i put "new" in quotes because both existed before their current names: The Ruby Room was formerly the San Diego Sports Club, while The Radio Room was formerly the Zombie Lounge. "Radios" and "Rubies" are apparently too close to one another in my memory, but Sports Clubs and Zombies seem pretty different, unless you are in some sort of undead vavi league or something... anyways, that should do it.

oh, and The Ruby Room is where we Modlins will be, next Friday, January 16th 2009, alongside our friends Swim Party, Team Abraham, and Gamma Gamma, in a concert celebration our friend Jason G getting 1 year more experience on this here planet earth. or something. poster coming soon. happy monday! happy new year!