Modey Lemon

Modey Lemon are burning layer of brutal rock napalm spread on a slice of rhythm and blues, served without a knife or a fork. A working class, Telecaster assault marching in lock step to unchained, Keith Moon chaos. Phil Boyd hammering his guitar into a tight boogie, sending Jimmy Page riffs plunging into bottomless a bottomless, b-movie abyss, all the while Paul Quattrone laying waste to his drums. A hydrogen bomb set to a beat.

Pittsburgh was the probably the only place to start. Boyd and Quattrone are as hard working and unaffected as they come. Both attended the University of Pittsburgh, but used the time to make plans and establish connections. No use for a degree that can’t deliver the future you want, and Boyd and Quattrone wanted to be in a band. Hungry and desperate in the summer of 1999, they set up camp on a Strip District sidewalk and played the blues in front of a closed fruit stand. There were moldy lemons on the ground. Boyd and Quattrone faked British accents. The rest is history.

Word hit the following summer that Modey Lemon were the best band in town. Early shows were the stuff of legends, Boyd behaving like an animal, Quattrone hurling himself through doors he found in his basement. Tough bars like the 31st Street Pub and Gooski’s became hubs for a punishing, back-to-basics music scene with Modey Lemon at its core. When the Iron City Beer-fueled throngs couldn’t get enough live, the boys unleashed the You Bug Me single. A tour with Pittsburgh punks Anti-Flag brought the mayhem to the masses. It was only the beginning.

The rest happens now. With their eponymous full-length finished for Anti-Flag’s A-F Records, Modey Lemon have set their sites on the world. Opening track "Big Bang" is a three chord bludgeoning complete with a sickly Moog squeals. "Coffin Talk," with its gurgled chorus, is tragically catchy. "Bad Neighborhood" rocks harder than any song you will hear this year, and the same could arguably be said for the album itself.

In a town renown for it’s hard work ethic, born out of the blood and sweat of men forging in the blazing steel furnaces hails Modey Lemon. This two-piece rock band has spent the last couple of years giving form to a sound born out of their own toil. Their journey began on the streets of Pittsburgh playing stripped-down blues through one small amplifier and a bare-bones drum kit equipped with a trash-can lid cymbal, hollering at the passing bar patrons for tips so they could afford to eat. Now the amps have grown larger and louder and the drums have gotten more pulsating. They have moved from hollering on the street corners to capturing the attention of Pittsburgh bar rock crowds and independent punk/rock crowds alike. Their music is self-described as "minimalist-excess" as they create as much sound as two people possibly could. It lies somewhere between the weird darkness of The Doors, the energy of early punk rock and roll, and an earthquake. Paul Quattrone brings the thunder in his Keith Moon style drumming. Phil Boyd brings the lightning with his Moog synthesizer drones and squeaks and his guitar death grip on Quattrone’s distinct rhythms. There live shows are complete high energy performances. Quattrone flails his arms and spits while his drumming pounds it’s way through the crowd. Boyd gyrates, flipping his shaggy mop around as he shrieks and bellows out through the microphone.