Recommended Albums #51

Modern Skirts: Catalogue of Generous Men (2005)

This is a little elegy for another band that deserved a little more love. Athens, Georgia’s Modern Skirts were built around the vocals of guitarist Jay Gulley and the keyboards of JoJo Glidewell, and for a couple albums their winning melodic indie pop formula showed great promise. The Skirts could muster two disparate moods effectively, and both the affecting melancholy and the rollicking feel-good piano driven vibe are represented in the attached songs.

The band’s third album, Gramahawk, however, was a pointed musical retrenchment. They weren’t the same gentle folk pop band they had been–it was like having a Pet Sounds dropped on fans waiting for another “Help Me, Rhonda”. Except I’m not sure it was good.

But Catalogue of Generous Men, their full-length debut, is heartbreakingly so, and deserved to break them on a wider scale. The frustrations of being a fan of such a band–seeing the CDs go out of print, watching in vain for a concert tour that brings them out of their own region to a nearby town–culminated for me today when I read they’d broken up just a couple months ago.

A song like “City Lights” is the perfect soundtrack for the moment of losing a band you love. Pardon my wallowing for a moment.

I invite you to share the high point in the career of one more talented group–and by all accounts a great bunch of guys too–who never grabbed the brass ring, but left us with a few golden moments.

Don’t miss: “N.Y. Song”