12 South Carolina Bands You Should Listen To Now
Musically, South Carolina often gets overshadowed by its neighbor to the North. But the Palmetto State boasts more than just the tourist destinations in Charleston and Myrtle Beach, and roadside fireworks megastores. Home to Toro Y Moi, Band of Horses and—of course—Hootie, South Carolina is also littered with ambitious chamber-pop and folk rock bands, warped art-rockers, bedroom guitar wizards and electronic dreamweavers. Indeed, the state of 4.6 million spawns more great music per capita than it really ought to. Here, in alphabetical order, are some of the standouts.
1. Company
Hometown: Charleston
Album: Dear America,
Between recording and releasing their first two collections—last year’s self-titled EP (Fat possum) and Holy City (Exit Stencil)—Company’s original drummer, Kelly Grant, passed away. The band soldiered on, but it’s cycled through two drummers and three bassists since Grants’ death. You’d never guess it, though, hearing Dear America, the band’s poised and thoughtful sophomore full-length. It’s full of big alt-rock swells suggesting the earnestness of Jimmy Eat World, Weezer or Rogue Wave, but the band’s textured guitar tones and frontman Brian Hannon’s honeyed vocal brings to mind The Shins and Band of Horses.
2. Gremlins
Hometown: Columbia
Album: Gremlins
Gremlins is a one-off collaboration between Mat Cothran of the depressive pop project Coma Cinema, Patrick Jeffords (touring bassist with Toro Y Moi), Katie Lee (of Canadian buzz-band Braids) and drummer Sam Ray. But don’t call it a supergroup—the overblown and disastrous results the term implies ring hollow here. Gremlin offer a dark and heavy-lidded take on synth-heavy millennial pop—something like a chillwave comedown. Against staggering synth-funk (reminiscent of, well, Toro Y Moi and Braids), Cothran sings with a shoegazing mumble that foils his bandmates’ grooves.
3. Milton Hall
Hometown: Columbia
Album: Numb World
As with the collage art and short videos, Milton Hall adopts a clearly handcrafted style to his lo-fi pop. But the 15-song cassette Numb World is, nevertheless, a focused and hooky collection. Interspersed with scattered cut-and-paste interludes, Hall assembles casually jangling acoustic garage-pop reminiscent of The Beets or Daniel Johnston in its unadorned presentation and its outsider charm.
4. Modern Man
Photo by Allen Glenn
Hometown: Greenville
Album: Eyes No
On their recent second full-length, Eyes No, Greenville grunge-gazers Modern Man step up the intensity under the murky, swirling guitars and windswept vocal reverb. Full of dark corners and dissonant chords, the dirge-like title track is a highlight propelled by an insistent rhythm and frontman David Allen Glenn’s dispassionate vocal. The result shares a spirit (or maybe a specter) with TV Ghost’s haunted post-punk and Apache Dropout’s speed-fried garage, but the sound is a distillation of Velvet Underground throb and MBV’s densest slabs of ’gazer gauze.
5. Pan
Hometown: Columbia
Album: These Are The Things I Love, And I Want To Share Them With You
It’s hard to pull off post-rock, post-Explosions In The Sky. The crescendo-to-nowhere builds and stunted cinematics of lesser acts so dilute the pack, it’s hard to get excited about a new band. But Pan set out to upend that expectation from the beginning. Its first EP was called, adamantly, Post-Rock Is Not Dead. The band’s first full-length makes a strong effort to prove it, too. With most songs capped under the four-minute mark, TATTILAIWTSTWY (unwieldy, even as an acronym) injects some much needed vitality into the instro-rock field. Sharp riffs informed by indie rock, post-hardcore and classic metal counter the big, foggy builds to make something much more lively than incidental volume ever could.
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