An Epic At Best

By Charley Lee

Photo by Patrick Blount

Any band that deliberately sets out to be an ‘emo’ band are assholes.” Roy Coughlin, guitarist for Athens band An Epic At Best, hopes to distance himself from the latest trend of labeling every bit of indie music as emo. “It’s soon going to be moot in our camp, I hope, because we’ve been writing some great pop/rock songs lately. I think the next album will kill off the emo murmurings about us for good.” Not to be content with just spinning their wheels, Robert Gunn (piano, guitar, vocals), Natalie Roberts (bass), Roy Coughlin (guitar) and James McGaw (drums) came together after several lineup changes and began making engaging pop/rock music. Formed around 2004, An Epic At Best has been generating buzz in the Athens music scene for quite some time. However, the band members found themselves more out of the main scene than in it while trying to tour and record their debut CD.

“School, members living in other cities and the general difficulties of being musicians with day jobs have conspired to keep us relatively quiet on the scene,” laments Coughlin. “We try to play out of town at least once a month and in Athens every couple of months.” Despite not being able to tour very much, the group’s first album, There Will Be Rain, stands as a true testament to what An Epic At Best is best at. Complex arrangements, alluring piano melodies and hauntingly stylish lyrics comprise the debut effort.

Singer/songwriter Gunn is the main impetus behind the writing process. “Robert generally brings in some piano or guitar parts and the beginning of a vocal melody and some lyrics, and we go from there,” Coughlin explains. “It is usually evident early on if the song has legs, and the process from there is pretty organic.” The CD, for the most part, sounds as if a group of friends got together and started jamming, building on one another in that intimate way that only people who have spent a lot of time with each other can do. One can also easily divine from the album that the band has extraordinary instrumental talents.

What may be surprising and a bit of a relief is that the band’s influences do not stick out like a sore thumb. It’s almost refreshing not to be able to pinpoint another band’s sound coming from the CD. “Despite having varied tastes, at the end of the day we all are still inspired by new music,” says Coughlin. “We didn’t sit down one day and go, ‘Here’s where our influences stop — let’s only ever write songs like this.’“ And while not having the familiar “sounds like so and so” label doesn’t do much for the casual listener to distinguish An Epic At Best from the herd, the band members are all confident in their approach. There even seems to be a mini-trend of authentic originality coming out of Athens with bands like Dark Meat and Iron Hero, two bands with which An Epic At Best shares a kind of kinship. “The rest of us make the music we make, informed by the bands that we have loved, and hope that it will stand on its own and be taken seriously,” Coughlin concludes. Currently the band is working on a handful of songs written over the past year that will hopefully see some studio time. Unfortunately for listeners, this may mean another disappearing act.

www.anepicatbest.com