Margot & the Nuclear So and So's to release new LP in March

By Shannon Shreibak

We’re all looking forward to New Year’s Eve. After a long year filled with hard work, stress and sleepless nights, we can finally end 2011 for good with the help of our methods of choice. It’s finally time to raise our glasses to yet another year. But Margot and the Nuclear So & So’s have more than 365 days to celebrate; they also have an album.

Rot Gut, Domestic, Margot’s fourth studio effort, will be released March 20th of 2012 from their own label, Mariel Recording Company. The new album further develops their unique style of guitar-driven indie pop. Rot is filled with the raw, lo-fi songs that dominated their 2010 release Buzzard, the beginning of an album trilogy wrought with their “panic pop” sound. This second installment remains consistent with Buzzard’s abandonment of bombastic orchestral arrangements that made Margot famous in order for a more focused rock sound.

Written in a mere 26 days, Margot frontman Richard Edwards began the process during a retreat in Pismo Beach, California in the wake of last spring. Searching for solace from the exhaustion of touring and severe stomach pain, he headed to the band’s west coast mecca after commencing the Buzzard tour. Using character development and imagery stemming from his experiences in the Midwest, Edwards paints an evocative musical landscape that envelops listeners in thick rock arrangements.

In celebration of this major accomplishment, MNSS will be performing at Deluxe at Amber Room in their hometown of Indianapolis, Indiana, on New Year’s Eve. Made exclusively for the NYE show, a limited edition 7-inch vinyl of Rot’s lead single “Prozac Rock” with B-Side “Fingertips” will be on sale. Any left over from the stock of 500 will be available to donors of the band’s PledgeMusic campaign before being made available to the public. “Prozac Rock” will hit the web on January 3rd.

Rot Gut, Domestic track listing:

1. Disease Tobacco Free
2. Books About Trains
3. Shannon
4. Prozac Rock
5. A Journalist Falls In Love
6. Frank Left
7. Fisher of Men

8. Arvydas Sabonis
9. Coonskin Cap
10. Ludlow Junk Hustle
11. The Devil
12. Christ

Record review: Margot and the Nuclear So and So's - 'Buzzard'

Posted by Bobby

Buzzard, the recent release from Chicago-based Margot and the Nuclear So and So's, is an album you should have if you plan on sitting on your porch and attempting to breathe in the extremely temporary, but no less potent, Midwest Autumn. It is filled with a bittersweet acknowledgment that beauty and sadness are indeed co-conspirators and that we'd do well not to forget it.

Before hearing the first note, I was fan due to the fact that the Buzzard's album art is so arresting. The girl on the cover stares back at potential listener like they've just caught her in the middle of something intimate, but she's not sure if she is going to ask them to leave… in fact, fuck it - maybe they can stay. The cover shot was taken by Chicago photographer Stephanie Bassos, and the rest of her portfolio is similarly radiant and darkly mesmerizing.

The first track, "Birds," establishes a theme throughout the album wherein lead vocalist Richard Edwards draws you in with sweetness and sincerity that eventually evolve into darker revelations. A soft round riff sews its way through the verse in a melancholy, inviting manner and once accepted the invitation explodes into a chorus of "lets have a party, lets have a party." By the second chorus, though, the request is the much more serious "lets have a baby, lets have a baby," and by the third - "lets make it evil, lets make it evil" - things are still exciting, but, as with the photo, we become a little unclear about just what we've walked in on.

The album moves deftly between beer guzzling guitars and tight vocal harmonies shifting between fun and loss in ways Wilco and Andrew Bird are familiar with. If all the songs stayed in that territory they would no doubt grow increasingly harder to remember, but there are also songs that take you into surreal emotional landscape, like the excellent "Tiny Vampire Robot," a song Wayne Coyne would envy. It is also very appealing to see Margot get a bit cocksure and show some swagger on "Your Lower Back." Later, "Lunatic, Lunatic, Lunatic" sheds a sad little light on crazy girls searching for love just like everybody else.

The production is crisp and visceral, giving the album the ability to blend a live excitement with ethereal grandiosity. The textures of the guitars give the songs an immersive quality that makes you feel as though they're surrounding you. The last track, the acoustic "I Do", is a distillation of the sweet, the lonely, the sad and mysterious that seems to reflect the record as a whole.

Upon finishing Buzzard, I was glad I had listened to it straight through, as an album, to get the satisfaction of the total package. I also felt like - forgive me the melodrama, but it is that kind of album - all the bowls had been smoked, no one needed anymore beer, leaves would continue to pile up in the gutter (but not for long), and maybe it always feels like the world is ending.