Eyelids

EYELIDS: Eyelids’ new album, A Colossal Waste of Light, does an excellent job of framing the quintet as one of today’s most compelling purveyors of lopsided guitar pop workouts and earworm-laden vocal melodies. It also proves that great guitar pop can still evoke favorites from a glorious past – the penetrating moodiness of XTC’s Black Sea, or R.E.M.’s Fables of the Reconstruction, comes to mind – while refusing to waste time on idle nostalgia. Whether it’s ‘Swinging in the Circus’ with its poignant musings on both stage fright and feeling like you don’t measure up, or the breezy Drums and Wires anthemic pop of ‘They Said So’, A Colossal Waste of Light speaks of and to the present, a time when light and dark can’t help but feel firmly intertwined. MODEL CITIZEN: Matt Patton and Mike Gaut formed Model Citizen just as their beloved Alabama punk scene was being overtaken by an onslaught of cookie-cutter melodic hardcore bands at the tail end of the 1990s. Neither of these young men had any formal music education; they were not athletic, nor had either of them experienced anything that could possibly be construed as “a metal phase”. Instead, they bonded over a love of The Who and other punkish prototypes, as well as a propensity for getting loud. Very, very loud. Gaut went on to drum for Chattanooga, TN’s brother-fronted rock unit Bohannons. Patton joined up on bass with Alabama’s Dexateen’s and currently holds down the low end with Athens’, GA’s Drive-By Truckers. Model Citizen has reunited with bassist Craig Gates, a member of the band’s most solid mid-2000s lineup. The addition of keys player and fellow Drive-By Trucker Jay Gonzales on the new record, Live At Dial Back Sound, brings the band closer to the sound the trio originally envisioned. The band expects to make all new music in the not-so-distant future.