Margot & the nuclear so and so’s third album Buzzard is primal and truculent, going straight for the vitals. Opener “Birds” finds the band going to places they haven’t before – lovely, languid verses progressing into fuzzed out, howling choruses throughout the song’s twists and turns – while still holding to the guitar-based ethos on which the album is founded. “Lunatic, lunatic, lunatic” may be familiar sonic territory for singer/guitarist Richard Edwards, but the (very) dark humor that slowly unveils is something that he has only flirted with (innocently) in the past. “New York City Hotel Blues” and “Claws Off” distill Margot’s music to its essence: melody-driven pop music with teeth, set adrift against Edwards’ surreal and emotional, if slightly twisted lyrical tendencies. Similarly, “I Do” refines the evocative chamber-pop for which the band is known to its most heart-rending fundamentals, supported by simply Richards’ plaintive voice and an acoustic guitar.
And there is, of course, an intriguing path that led Margot towards this evolution in sound, which contrasts the lively optimism of 2008’s Animal! (and/or Not Animal, simultaneously released after contention with former label Epic). Buzzard was recorded over one freezing month last winter in an abandoned movie theater in Chicago’s Ukrainian Village neighborhood. Edwards had taken up residence there after leaving his hometown of Indianapolis, when the house where he and the previous seven members of the band had lived was damaged in a fire last summer. Once settled, he began writing a collection of songs loosely inspired by the 8mm ‘nudie cutie’ films unearthed in the theater’s basement, and the youthful reaction of mixed emotions that the films evoked.
After six months of writing, longtime Margot members Tyler Watkins and Erik Kang joined Edwards in Chicago and the three began to dig into the new material. A cast of local musicians, who had begun to come to the theater to watch weekly screenings of Kamikaze Hearts, soon also joined them. It was against this grainy backdrop that Edwards and Co. recorded the songs with the help of these new friends, including drummer/producer Brian Deck, Tim Rutili (Califone, Red Red Meat), Joe Adamik, Cameron McGill, Katie Todd and Ronnie Kwasman.
Theater seating was cleared away to accommodate the instruments, while a makeshift control room was assembled in the projection perch. As the days went by, a dusky, Bacchic energy started to fill the theater and Buzzard began to take form. Recording took place between the hours of 10pm and 5am, and no artificial light was allowed (as such, three musicians and engineer Neil Strauch broke bones from tripping over cables). Accidents aside, the willful band – live and manic, newly freed from any past constraints – growled their way through the songs and infused them with a raw, forceful energy that Margot had only hinted at in their past recordings. The result is the band’s most immediate studio recording: bigger and louder than ever before, finally capturing Margot’s powerful, captivating live show and defiantly Midwestern sound.
Margot & The Nuclear So & So's website
...The Lonely Forest possesses a remarkably sophisticated songwriting acumen and a knack for delivering interesting, winning melodies mainly via piano, bass, and drums. In their lusher moments, the band—led by John Van Deusen and his passionate vocals—combines the pop majesty of the Long Winters with the quirkiness of XTC, but when Van Deusen busts out his guitar, the thrust becomes punkish. They're absolutely poised to be one of Seattle's next breakout acts.
- Seattle Weekly
The Lonely Forest on Facebook
Born in 1877 in Calw, on the edge of the Black Forest, Cameron McGill was brought up in a missionary household where it was assumed that he would study for the ministry. McGill's religious crisis led to his fleeing from the Maulbronn seminary in 1891, an unsuccessful cure by a well-known theologian and faith healer, and an attempted suicide. After being expelled from high school, he worked in bookshops for several years.
His first collection, 'Stories of The Knife and The Back', describes a youth who leaves his mountain village to become a poet. The lush instrumentation and beautifully crafted melodies, belie the darker nature of the song content. Mostly focusing on personal admissions of guilt and failure, the album's characters struggle in coming to terms with their mortality. All throughout, they simply try to find a friend and fall in love.
This was followed by 'Street Ballads & Murderesques', the tale of a schoolboy totally out of touch with his contemporaries, who flees through different cities after his escape from home. The collection of material on Streets...takes pop musick to the dark libraries of your old house, inhabits a stark and desperate corner of the mind, and simply tells a good story. The wildly vibrant characters offer their most honest interpretations of the dishonest life. They travel time, fall in and out of love, miss and are missed. These are songs of imminent regret, class IV rapids, European gypsies, pre-renaissance Germany, cities with chips on their shoulder, veterans of domestic war, handwritten letters and handmade harmony, foreign wines and local girls, break-ups and breakdowns, and post-war divorcees.
World War I came as a terrific shock, and McGill joined the pacifist Romain Rolland in antiwar activities--not only writing antiwar songs, but editing two newspapers for prisoners of war. During this period, McGill's first marriage broke up (reflected in "It's Not Right" off of 'Street Ballads & Murderesques'), he studied the works of Freud, eventually underwent analysis with Jung, and was for a time a patient in a sanatorium.
In 1919 he moved permanently to Switzerland, and brought out Cameron McGill & What Army, which reflects his preoccupation with the workings of the subconscious and with battles against depression...but mostly focuses on learning how to have fun. Their first document was the dense 'Hold on Beauty' which was released last winter amongst intense fighting. April of the new year, saw the release of 'warm songs for cold shoulders' by the forward thinking Parasol label.
He never won the Nobel Prize, but his mother always loved him. Until his death in 2056, he lived in seclusion in Illinois.
Cameron McGill & What Army on Facebook
$12 in adv, $14 DOS, 18+
Doors @ 9 pm
Advance tickets available @ Ticket Alternative, Criminal Records,
Decatur CD, Fantasyland Records and the following CD Warehouse locations: Buford, Duluth, Kennesaw, Lawrenceville and Roswell.
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