If you'd called Emily Massey a musician just a few years ago, she would have corrected you. She was a dancer who trained with Madison Ballet. Her dad, Mike Massey, was the main musician of the family. He wrote the score to the company's 2013 hit, Dracula.
Then everything changed. A back injury sidelined Massey during her sophomore year at Madison East. To make a full recovery, she had to limit her physical activity for several years. No ballet training, no sports, nothing strenuous. She felt boxed in.
"Suddenly I had no creative release, so I picked up a guitar," she recalls.
It wasn't her first experience with the instrument. Her dad records and rehearses music around the house, and she'd taken guitar lessons at age 10, after falling in love with the movie School of Rock.
This time, the guitar didn't just help her express her appreciation for Jack Black. It helped her find a new identity when ballet pirouetted out of the picture.
"People expected me to be a musician because of my dad, so I sort of wanted to fight it for a while," she says.
But music turned out to be just what she needed, especially when she met bassist Alivia Kleinfeldt and drummer Emma Witmer about two years ago.
"They went to high school in Verona, and my sister knew them. It turned out they needed a new lead singer for their band," Massey recalls.
Before long Massey was the new face of Modern Mod. Several of the original members have gone to college, and what was once a quintet is now a quartet. Kleinfeldt and Massey now helm the act with guitarist Cal Pocernich and drummer Brendan Manley. Massey lovingly describes Kleinfelt, Pocernich and Manley as "a basketball prodigy, a poetic introvert and a giant blond boy," united by an affection for jangly '60s rock, including some of the records her parents played when she was a kid.
Massey had no idea how much her adventures with Modern Mod would mirror her dad's experiences from his teens and early 20s.
The elder Massey took a similar path to a music career with Chaser, the rock band he formed with high school buddies Mike Ripp and Tony Cerniglia. The lead single from their demo became a hit on local radio stations, and the group nearly scored a record deal with Atlantic in 1981.
When the deal didn't materialize, the bandmates found other outlets for their talents. Cerniglia went on to drum for fellow rock acts Seventeen Rhinos and the Renfields. More recently, he and Mike Massey have teamed up in Stop the Clock. When Cerniglia's not performing, he serves as a engineer, producer and songwriter for other musicians, including Stop the Clock vocalist Briana Hardyman. Ripp has played guitar in numerous Madison acts and recorded with folks like Kyle Henderson, the local blues singer who got his start in the '80s rock band the Producers.
Modern Mod's future may also include a brush with fame -- or more, if their first album is any indication.
Subterranean surf-pop
Modern Mod's debut, Tunnels, was conceived in several basement bedrooms and funded with a Kickstarter campaign that raised more than $5,600 in a month. The band's current members all have subterranean sleeping quarters in their parents' homes. "As underground cave dwellers, we often joke about digging tunnels to connect us to each other's basements," Massey explains on the band's website.
Massey quickly cites the bedroom pop tradition -- recording lo-fi tracks in one's home, often in a bedroom closed off from one's parents or roommates -- when discussing the album.
"We're all about 18 or 19, and bedroom recording is interesting because it can feel like a very adult thing -- expressing ideas that are truly ours, in our own words -- while also feeling an adolescent thing, like escaping to your bedroom when you need some space from your family," she says. "Making music this way is sort of like keeping a private diary you can show to other people when you choose."
"Tunnels" also represents the way the many of the group's songs burrow into the psyche, where their hooks and choruses play on repeat. They're true earworms, especially "Don't" and "Papercuts," the album's first two tracks. The former brims with the romance of the unknown, the kind of unknown that comes with those first teetering steps into adulthood. Sunny, surfy guitar and bass set the stage for a bold invitation ("Take my hands though I don't even know you") and a warning sung in four-part harmony ("Don't wait up for me.") "Papercuts" alternates between hopeful and melancholy, with upbeat drumming propelling the melody forward and Massey's voice melting the lyrics' icy edges, asking, "Why are you all alone?" and "Can you keep a secret?"
The album's sound is equal parts early '60s and early '00s, with hints of the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds and Rilo Kiley's More Adventurous. More modern influences abound as well. "Undefined" takes the band into '60s girl-group territory with an intro Dum Dum Girls would appreciate, then dives into rock full force. Modern Mod also list new-ish groups like Best Coast and La Luz as inspirations, but they expect to explore more sounds from the '80s and '90s in the future.
"We've been describing our sound as '60s surf-rock with an '80s Europop vibe, but we're moving into this mid-'80s London new-wave thing," Massey says. "There's a dancey feel to what we're doing right now, but it's also meant to be thought provoking."
Taking Stanford by storm
Modern Mod have opened for Matt & Kim, JD Samson & Men and several other indie acts that share their ability to make crowds dance. Massey says her dance training has encouraged her to develop a dynamic stage persona and move around the stage in unconventional ways.
"I'm always trying to move the show in a direction that's more theatrical or exciting, with a lot of movement in the mix," she explains. "This can result in some pretty out-there performances, but that's so much more interesting than people just standing around playing their instruments."
Though pushing the envelope on stage doesn't faze Modern Mod, the band did feel daunted by at least one task in 2014: sharing Tunnels with media outlets across the country.
College radio DJs have taken notice of Tunnels on both coasts and at several points in between. In particular, the album has done well at schools in large markets. It took off at DePaul University in Chicago, but its biggest fans, by far, are at Stanford University near San Francisco. Tunnels contained some of the student body's favorite new songs of the spring. It quickly landed a spot on the radio station's list of top five most popular albums, and DJs compared the band to rising stars like Eux Autres, Hospitality and Madder Rose.
Massey calls the Stanford love "a shocker."
"We're brand new at promoting ourselves, so we were so excited when the Stanford radio station tweeted at us that we were in their top 10, and then their top five," Massey says.
Some of the first praise from Stanford came from a DJ who wrote a mini-review from the perspective of a cat.
"His review said things like, 'purrfect,' which was silly, but I think it made people pay attention," Massey says.
More importantly, the Stanford support boosted the band's confidence.
"It was this huge realization of 'Wow, I think we maybe can do this being-a-band thing," Massey says.
