Soundbite: Margot & The Nuclear So and So’s
By Christie McCollum
Oct. 13, 2008 9:00 p.m.
Records should come with instructions.
Everything else does. Cake mixes, gym equipment, teas and hair dyes all tell you how to achieve optimal results. So why not LPs?
Because what you don’t know when you put on the new Margot and the Nuclear So and So’s album, “Animal!” is that you can’t listen to this record in the living room. You can’t sing to it in the shower, you can’t discuss it over a cup of tea, and you can’t play it in your car. In the wrong setting, the album’s colorful nuance fades into nothingness, leaving a monotonous drone in its wake.
This is headphone music. Headphone music best enjoyed on a walk, chin up, eyes meeting others’, or while lying in the grass and courting the clouds. In stereo, when the album’s intricacies no longer must compete for your attention, Margot shines. And they should ““ the eight-piece orchestral collective combines the talents and the quirks of all its members, molding them like clay into something subtle at first blush and Byzantine and opulent by the end of a song.
The layers build gradually upon a song’s foundation. In stand-out track “Mariel’s Brazen Overture,” a gently plucked acoustic guitar sets an autumnal tone, later corroborated by a delicate violin, rollicking drums, a sparse, 1920s throwback bassline and barely audible slow-motion trumpet trills ““ for emphasis. Positioned gently atop the layers, Emily Watkins’ delicate harmonies complement singer/guitarist Richard Edwards’ impossible-to-pin-down voice, a voice that you’ve heard somewhere in a movie, on the street, at lunch. The song, one of 12 on the album ““ and one of 19, if you take into account the label’s also-released, preferred version of the album, “Not Animal” ““ finds the band at their best. Intricate and vast, the song reads like a bluesy postmodern symphony, spanning the entire spectrum of emotions in its fleeting opus.
Not all the tracks enjoy the same success. “German Motor Car,” which made the cut for both “Animal!” and “Not Animal,” suffers from a lazy, truncated conclusion. “Pray that you are noting like your photo at all,” sings Edwards, right before the Wizard-of-Oz, disembodied voice of a producer in a studio somewhere turns down the input volume, forcing a premature decrescendo and tainting something otherwise quite listenable.
A minor flaw in the context of the album as a whole.
Every other track is at least amenable, a fitting soundtrack for a stroll or journal entry. Several songs ““ “Hello Vagina,” “I am a Lightning Rod,” “A Children’s Crusade on Acid,” “As Tall as Cliffs” ““ couldn’t be better.
“Hello Vagina,” far more substantial than its shock-value title would imply, pairs rosy, blushing video-game sounds with a heavy bassline and barebones percussion. The face-value simplicity allows for brief cameos from the other instruments: Choruses of shimmery strings, horns, slide guitar and Watkins’ ohs and ahs flutter about the song, advertising both the band’s restraint and its penchant for stripped-down theatrics.
The formula appears in various incarnations throughout the album, culminating in the organic, spiritual verses of “As Tall as Cliffs.” “You’ll hang like the rest/We’ll leave a noose on/The attorney’s desk/Take to the streets/Chant like an army/And doctor up this disease,” sings Edwards over a crystalline pool of earthy percussion, harmonica, airy xylophone and guitar so sparse that every note resonates like one of Thoreau’s concluding lines.
The album is peppered with these cleansing moments. But like meditating, journaling or practicing yoga, they’re solitary experiences ““ improper setting breeds futility. It’s only through the isolated calm of headphones that this album comes into its own, revealing lush, dreamlike soundscapes bathed in poignant subtlety.
““ Christie McCollum
E-mail McCollum at [email protected].
