Review: Hot Mulligan Proves Its No Mere Emo Throwback at Sold-Out Rock Hall Show

Hot Mulligan at the Rock Hall in Cleveland Credit: Photo by Eric Heisig

While Hot Mulligan’s music hearkens back to a time when emo was more prevalent, its concert Thursday night outside the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame was proof that the genre never fully went away and that there are still vital bands plugging away and mining it for inspiration.

The Lansing, Michigan-hailing quintet’s 70-plus-minute set was chock full of the genre’s hallmarks: virtuosic, clean guitar riffs, distorted chords, bashed drums and alternating yelped and screamed vocals. It can be an acquired taste, and sometimes the songs felt straight out of the late 1990s and early 2000s. But the band’s sold-out performance had an urgency that mere throwback bands lack.
From opener “Drink Milk and Run” on, Hot Mulligan’s intensity never faltered, even if frontman Nathan “Tades” Sanville remarked more than once how “weird” it was to play outside the Rock Hall.

“Is there anything for emo in there?” Sanville asked the crowd of the museum, before the band tore into the pop-punk-inspired “End Eric Sparrow and the Life of Him.”

Hot Mulligan’s work ethic has paid off over more than a decade together. It played the Cleveland area multiple times in recent years, with its last appearance being in September at The Roxy in Lakewood. Its popularity here is only growing as a result, as evidenced by the fact that Thursday’s show sold out and boasted a merch line that concertgoers said took more than 45 minutes to get through.

But it’s not just Cleveland. The show was a stop on a tour taking the band to Bonnaroo for a performance on Saturday, where the crowd has the potential to be even larger. And Hot Mulligan’s record label, Wax Bodega (which has ties to Cleveland), already sold out several preorders of vinyl variants of their upcoming album, The Sound a Body Makes When It’s Still, ahead of an August release date.

The band played a song off the new record on Thursday, and it fit right in with the rest of a set that was sometimes predictable and other times inspired. The rest was much more familiar to the capacity crowd, though, as Sanville and guitarist/co-lead vocalist Chris Freeman led one sing/shout-along after another.

Hot Mulligan closed with “How Do You Know It’s Not Armadillo Shells?” and “I Fell in Love with Princess Peach,” two of its strongest tunes. They were among the best examples of what the band is capable of when it works to create music that resonates today.

To paraphrase a T-shirt that one concertgoer was wearing, I guess emo isn’t dead just yet.

Setlist:
1. Drink Milk and Run
2. Shhhh! Golf Is On
3. Fly Move (The Whole Time)
4. And I Smoke
5. Shouldn’t Have a Leg Hole But I Do/It’s a Family Movie She Hates Her Dad
6. Gans Media Retro Games
7. Stickers of Brian
8. And a Big Load
9. This Song Is Called It’s Called What’s It Called
10. End Eric Sparrow and the Life of Him
11. John “The Rock” Cena, Can You Smell What the Undertaker
12. We’re Gonna Make It to Kilby!
13. Digging In
14. OG Bule Sky
15. *Equip Sunglasses*
16. BCKYRD
17. How Do You Know It’s Not Armadillo Shells?
18. I Fell in Love with Princess Peach