The name The Strugglers signifies music made by singular American singer Brice Randall Bickford. Reared in southern Virginia, Bickford began performing as The Strugglers shortly after moving to New York City. He self-released his first album, Done by The Strugglers in 2001, and received much praise from those who heard the sparsely distributed 4-track recording. In 2003, after a move back to the south and a month-long tour of the eastern U.S., Tract Records issued The Strugglers' second album The New Room, a more cohesive statement recorded by Neil Allen of The Virginia Reel on a digital 8-track. Acuarela then commissioned a recording from Bickford that eventually became the five-song EP The Fair Store. The finished product, along with a forthcoming new full-length studio-recorded album, make for the most accomplished and seasoned material The Strugglers have yet produced. Bell-clear production and spare instrumentation frame the material on The Fair Store, a five-song stylistic foray into shiny 70's classic rock and something we could call twisted folk. A retrospective, pastoral rendering in verse of the idea of childhood as one's own mythology, the EP may actually sound younger than previous Strugglers offerings, evidence of an effort to achieve a more direct and innocent communication. Autumnal themes, interwoven so as to be inextricable from the many images of looking backward, lend an element of regret to an otherwise uncharacteristically warm and bright affair. The Fair Store, recorded by Jerry Kee - who has previously worked with the likes of Polvo, The Kingsbury Manx, Superchunk or Portastatic- is a document of an artist moving toward a more full-grown (not mature) and actualized sound. Not, in the critics' parlance, a transition piece: it is a solid bridge to further things.