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Margot and the Nuclear So and So's

Happy Hour at Sprigg's Vol. 1: Live & Acoustic

(Mariel Recording Company; US: 11 Jan 2011; UK: import)

The acoustic performance is trickier than it seems. The fundamental approach can sometimes yield performances that are intimate and, at their best, offer a new context for the way we hear songs we thought we already knew. However, all too often acoustic performances can slip into something overly simple and drowsy. Unfortunately, Happy Hour at Sprigg’s falls into that drowsy camp. As a companion piece to the band’s latest album, Buzzard, it is at first an interesting counterpoint to the moody power-pop of that record. After the first few hushed strums, though, none of these songs offers much in the way of surprises. The songs taken from that record, particularly opener “Will You Love Me Forever?”, feel thin without the album’s buzzing layers, and laid bare the melodies don’t quite hold up. New songs like “There’s a Freakshow Downtown” feel like they didn’t make the record for a reason, since it’s hard to tell where they’re going without other instruments to help fill them out. This isn’t to say that this isn’t a heartfelt performance—the feeling in Richard Edwards’s voice nearly keeps the set afloat—it’s just that it doesn’t add anything to the songs on the album and mostly leaves you missing what’s not there rather than investing in what is.

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26 Apr 2012
As the leader of Indianapolis’s Margot and the Nuclear So and So’s, Richard Edwards is a songwriter who knows what he wants. The result has been one of the more varied and interesting discographies to be found among modern indies.
6 Apr 2012
Mercurial Midwest collective turns in an album of fuzzy rock that once again redefines their style and the lyrics are as devastating as ever.
5 Nov 2008
Not Animal isn't exactly what the band wants it to be, but it is an interesting record in the musical evolution of the group and it does have a few thoroughly gorgeous, charming pieces of chamber pop.
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With a relatively meteoric rise, chamber-pop band Margot and the Nuclear So and So's are fast becoming one of those mythical indie rock basement-to-penthouse success stories. And it's all so well deserved.
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