It’s a One (Gift) Horse Town, So Let’s Paint it Red

This year, the greater music world has seen a surge in the popularity and prevalence of electronic, chillwave, and lo-fi jams. However, if you reduced your worldview to Athens, you’d have little idea of that. We’re living up to our nickname, “Seattle of the South”, by keeping grunge very much alive. We may seem pretty far removed from the Seattle scene (literally by about 2,730 miles), but our affinity for grunge actually makes sense; aren’t we the Dirty South?

One of Athens’ finest examples of the genre is Gift Horse, a group that has mixed and mastered grunge, shoegaze, and psychedelic rock…

This spring they released their full-length debut, Mountain of Youth, and proved that their sound holds its integrity both live and on record. “Missionaries” is a grimy, apathetically angsty track that nonetheless inspires cheery head bobbing. “October House” is an oxymoron that manifests as highly engaging stoner rock. In all, Gift Horse manages to keep things fresh in a genre where monotonous droning is de rigueur.

We’ve established that Hunter, Mike and Vaughan have music skills… but here at UGAstyle, we like to take folks out of their comfort zones. With that in mind, we decided to see how they fared when they ventured from the aural to the visual. So, on a recent evening we convened with 30 beers, a 6’x9’ canvas, a few cans of paint, and a lot of mosquito repellent. The guys had half an hour to do their thang in any way they saw fit. And boy, did they utilize their time…

As they painted, each displayed a highly individual style; Hunter was prone to bold, aggressive abstract strokes, Vaughan favored animal imagery (hand turkeys, anyone?), and Mike employed the drip technique, which added an element of delicacy to the controlled chaos. To top it off, they grabbed some leaves and stuck them in the puddles of paint. What emerged was a colorful work of abstract expressionism that could have been the bastard child of Jackson Pollock & Franz Kline. Not too shabby, guys!

Two days later, the paint is still drying. Hopefully it’ll be ready by this Friday, when Gift Horse will be rocking the 40 Watt with Nate Nelson and the Modern Skirts. For only $8, you’ll get a sampling of diverse sounds from three of the most popular bands in Athens. Hey, you might even get to see Gift Horse’s masterpiece! Who knows…with the current buzz about Gift Horse, it could be worth a lot in the future.