Superhero Power

After five years, six tours, and over 150 shows, indie pop quartet the Modlins

are calling it a day following a final performance at the Whistle Stop on August 20. During its run, the prolific band managed ten releases, including five full-length albums, four EPs, and a single. The band earned a San Diego Music Award in 2008 for their album With Friends Like These.

The end of the group is due to guitarist Eric Killian relocating to the East Coast, though bassist Alex Smith’s pending wedding and drummer Stoph Rhanor’s non-Modlins activities with other groups also pointed to changes within the band.

In the meantime, the Modlins are issuing two more albums to coincide with their breakup, Shoot the Moon and Late Night Feel. Despite releasing 28 songs at once on the discs, Killian notes there is still enough material left for at least two further albums, including soundtrack material written for a friend’s stage adaptation of Alice in Wonderland. “Our ‘superhero power’ is writing too many songs,” laughed Killian, who penned the bulk of the band’s tunes with guitarist Matt Sheridan. “We wrote all the Alice songs before we found out Tim Burton was remaking it,” he said. “We also have another 10 to 15 songs hanging around that are a bit older. They just never made it to any record. I’d happily let them go the way of the dodo, but Matt’s a strong proponent of trying to release it all.” There is also a cover of the Pixies’ “Gouge Away” in the vault.

While the farewell is set in stone, Sheridan still holds out hope that there may be more from the Modlins, despite the odds against it. “Believe it or not, I still feel like we have more to say,” he commented. “So I hope that after we’ve had a nice break, we can adapt our circumstances, or adapt to our circumstances to make that happen.”

Killian is more pragmatic about the future. “You’ll always ask yourself, Is there more we could’ve done? Should we have recorded that differently? What if we wrote just one more song?” said Killian. “But at this point, we’ve got over 80 songs recorded. I think being able to look back at our discography as it stands now, it’s a testament to all the hard work we’ve put in over the years.”