10 Years Of “As Tall As Cliffs”
The band was called Margot & the Nuclear So and So’s. At the time of the song’s release, there were apparently eight musicians in the band, though it’s hard to pin down a precise number. Some decent live videos from 2008 appear to show seven onstage, adding two violinists, a cellist, and a trumpeter to a standard guitar-drums-keyboard indie arrangement. The exact figure doesn’t matter. This band, like Broken Social Scene and Arcade Fire before it, was a cyclone of bodies and chamber instruments. They were meant to overwhelm you.
Given the panorama of personnel, you might’ve mistaken them for Canadian. But their demeanor suggested something more grizzled and American: Midwestern flannel folkies who likely drank too much and didn’t get nearly enough sunlight. It was only nine hours east from Conor Oberst’s Omaha to the Indianapolis of Margot’s leader, Richard Edwards. On “Jen Is Bringin the Drugs,” Edwards drops something, maybe, or breaks a string merely 20 seconds from the end; instead of cutting another take, he left it on the album, complete with the ragged “fuck it” he sighs slightly off-mic. He had a bright but broken voice, the kind necessary to deliver the song’s crushing nihilism: “‘Cause love is an inkless pen / It’s a tavern, it’s sin / It’s a horrible way to begin.”
And yet, this being the mid-aughts, that quiet depressive ode was sandwiched between one with Funeral’s disco drums and another with Yankee Hotel Foxtrot’s spooky country ambience. It wasn’t until two years later that Edwards and his ramshackle collective released a song so quintessentially earnest in its Bush-years joy that it exists now, in our twisted present, as an time capsule of sheer escapism. That song was called “As Tall As Cliffs.”
In late 2008, the band performed it as a “Take-Away Show” for Vincent Moon’s La Blogotheque, an indie rite of passage in that era. The conceit was simple: Bands performed stripped-down versions of their songs in surprising public locales, usually around European cities, for receptive, if unexpected, audiences. (The Fleet Foxes and Arcade Fire sessions are definitive, but the whole project is a treasure trove.)
Margot filmed theirs in San Francisco on the USF campus featuring roughly 20 people outfitted with shakers, buckets, and, of course, two hands for clappin’. Here was the band that, legend goes, found its origin in a pet store meet-cute, now blooming into dozens of twee participants all in pursuit of making One Good Song come alive in the night. Through its four-chord jangle and skyward melody, “As Tall As Cliffs” could command an entire group to take wing the way a good secular hymn can. The song is a pre-Magnetic Zeros country wedding, thankfully spared of any mentions of “maw” and “paw.” Here, on the USF campus, was the same band that might’ve taken its name from a Wes Anderson character—which, OK, but at least they weren’t called Noah & the Whale.
That same fall, I was in my first semester at a small college in New York State’s Southern Tier and beginning to get involved with the campus radio station. That’s how I found out about Ra Ra Riot. And Ra Ra Riot is how I found out about a lot of things — namely that 1) “St. Peter’s Day Festival” is an all-time great song, 2) a ton of contemporary bands were after this chamber-pop thing, too, and 3) we were firmly living in a post-Arcade Fire (post-Neutral Milk Hotel, really) world. But we’ll get there.
Then, the station’s music directors trekked down to the city for CMJ and saw Margot do “As Tall As Cliffs” at Bowery Ballroom in vintage sport coats. “Was v good,” one texted me recently about his memories of the show. “I loved it. I was way into them at the time,” said the other. I presented them with a hypothesis I’ve thought about a lot lately, that Margot represented a kind of tipping point in the post-Arcade Fire indie landscape. “As Tall As Cliffs” is possibly the last of its kind: an Actually Good song dressed in thrift-store boots and adorned with flower crowns, while “Home” and “Ho Hey”—and really everything subsequently built from handclaps and acoustic progressions—are utterly wack. (Both called this a fair view.) But why?
“A few years after Y2K, indie rock was overrun with bands that could not have existed without [Neutral Milk Hotel]’s big bang: The Decemberists, Okkervil River, Beirut, even early Arcade Fire, who signed to Merge partly because of their devotion to Aeroplane,” Stereogum’s Chris DeVille wrote in a 20th-anniversary piece for In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. “That wave has long since crested, but still today groups are out there spinning psychedelic folk-rock suites indebted to NMH (sup, Saintseneca) or further gentrifying their sound into pleasant festival-core (all those ‘Hey!’ bands like The Lumineers and Of Monsters and Men).”
In other words, Neutral Milk Hotel’s old-timey chaos begat a ton of bands whose more mainstreamed approach begat an even larger deluge of bands including Margot, Mumford & Sons (to a certain degree) and, yes, The Lumineers, eventually giving rise to the utter corporate dregs of acts like American Authors. Such a simplification is dangerous, I know, and clearly Marcus Mumford was always destined to make music, whether it sounded like rolling-thunder folk or, say, I don’t know, mid-period U2. But the skeleton of a logical idea path is here, which brings me back to the central point I alluded to earlier: “As Tall As Cliffs” remains a key time capsule of late-2000s indie, even if it’s rarely talked about. For that reason, it’s important.
Released on both albums Margot dropped in October 2008 (Animal! and Not Animal), “As Tall As Cliffs” was celebrated as “a mix of rootsiness and Modest Mouse-y weirdness that finally hints at sun shining through the grey” by Pitchfork, in one of the only positive notes they gave the album pair. I like this description because it’s true, but also because it splits the fundamental issue I laid out above into two parts: the “rootsiness” and the weirdness. “Ho Hey” is rootsy, but it’s not weird. Same for “Home” and “Little Talks” and everything The Head and the Heart did, save for their self-titled album artwork, which indeed weird. The list goes on. Yet another list, one including the rootsy and the weird, is maybe equally as long and would have to include Dr. Dog, Wilco, Fleet Foxes, The Low Anthem, even Lord Huron on certain songs. This is all to say that rootsy alone can be good, and weird alone is also often good, but rootsy and weird is the sweet spot.
“As Tall As Cliffs” is very sweet without being cloying. It’s detached enough to feel broken-hearted but not Tumblresque, rootsy but not too consignment-shoppy, an old-soul anthem that can barely get out of bed to become one. It’s about the end of something, and even though it doesn’t feel political in the slightest, its music video follows a fictional President George W. Bush on what’s supposed to be his last day in office, January 19, 2009.
As W. chugs beers in the back of a limo and skulks around an empty strip club, the clip plays out like a bizarro Boogie Nights climax where POTUS 43 is both Rollergirl and the guy she kicks the snot out of with her skate. The close-up on his face as Edwards begins the song with “I tell tales tall as cliffs” makes the reason for the visual clear enough: Lying Bush sucks, and he knows he sucks, and he’ll be just as happy as we are when he’s not president anymore. It’s telling, too, that the video unfolds on his purported last day in office, not on the day after. This one’s an age-old fantasy, telling off your boss before peacing out forever. Of course, when you’re the president, your “boss” is the American people, so you answer to us. And answer he does here, with lots of Budweiser.
Were we ever so innocent? This carefree spirit of risqué political satire is lost in our hellish age of Twitter, when the sitting president is an actual meme. But I can’t help but watch the “As Tall As Cliffs” clip as the proper goodbye the band itself might’ve been denied as indie listeners itching for discovery began flocking to music blogs less and streaming platforms more. The impact of Spotify-ification (f.k.a. Mumfording) was colossal. In June 2017, I saw U2 in a football stadium, but not before witnessing The Lumineers stomp-clap their way through “Ho Hey” for thousands of people, a lot of whom clapped right along. They certainly wouldn’t have done that for “As Tall As Cliffs.”
But it’s still fun to play what if. To imagine George W. Bush being abandoned by Secret Service as soon as his second term expired. To dream up 82,000 people taking in something both rootsy and weird—unspooled by nearly a dozen musicians with mangy hair and cigarettes hanging low from their lips—and feeling like, yeah, right now, this is something we need. And then moving on.
