Recap Margot & The Nuclear So And So’s at the Hi-Dive

The first thing noticeable when Margot & The Nuclear So And So’s took the stage Sunday night at the Hi-Dive was the darkness. Throughout the band's set, its eight members were lit only by a few spotlights scattered around stage, including one that shone through a drum like a full moon. They completely ditched the Hi-Dive's standard red-and-blue-lights aesthetic, opting instead for the distinct impression that they were playing in a dim living room.

And that’s just one thing they do differently. The So And So’s get compared to other melodic and melancholic acts like The Decemberists and Bright Eyes. But what sets them apart is a refreshing lack of pretension. They prove that it’s possible to write painfully honest and sometimes downright miserable indie-rock songs without succumbing to the kind of “sadder than thou” rut that plagues so many. Singer-guitarist Richard Edwards is like an alternate-dimension Conor Oberst—but instead of suffering through an embarrassingly public period of lo-fi depression on record, somehow Edwards skipped all that and got straight the elegant, orchestral pop songs.

What made the whole deal even sweeter during Sunday's performance was Edwards’ charmingly drunken stage presence. During the obligatory “Denver’s always so great to us” portion of the show, Edwards launched into a story about playing the Monolith Festival at Red Rocks last September. “I got accosted by Anton Newcombe from Brian Jonestown Massacre,” he said, his mind clearly wandering. “He got thrown out of the festival for starting a fight with Wayne Coyne.” Later, when someone shouted out a request for the song “Barfight Revolution, Power Violence,” Edwards shouted back, “College graduation!” as if that’s what he’d heard—a snarky rejection of the audience member’s request for an older song. Immediately after the show, Richards went to the bar for a pint of wine. In a pint glass.

But Richards is clearly a professional, and between drunken slurs and meandering stories, the man—and the whole band—was on point. For all of their songs about ordinary people (like “On A Freezing Chicago Street”) and, um, rodents (“Mariel’s Brazen Overture”), the So And So's' sound was extraordinarily huge. Boasting trumpet, trombone, and all kinds of homemade percussion—like a water jug affixed to something like an IV pole—on top of the standard instrumentation, the band was a kind of cobbled-together orchestra. On the climactic and crashing “As Tall As Cliffs,” each and every member of the band was banging hard on something—drums, piano keys, guitars, that damn water jug—and somehow it was impossible, for a minute or two, to believe there were only eight of them up there. Maybe that was the real reason for the darkness onstage: to conceal the dozen other musicians they were hiding up there.