Manchester Orchestra

One Liner: Very good indie rock, in between Iron & Wine and Gaslight Anthem.

Wikipedia Genre: Indie rock, alternative rock, art rock
Home:  Atlanta.

Poster Position: 7
Day: Friday at 4:45
Both Weekends.

Thoughts:  Odd juxtaposition of sounds if you just run through the top ten most popular tracks for this band on Spotify.  I'm going to go ahead and write this review as I run through those, and then will offer more comprehensive thoughts once I've run through everything.

The first song, the very excellent "The Gold," calls to mind Iron and Wine or Lord Huron or Death Cab.  Slightly rockin', very emotional, powerful indie rock tune.  Has just over 7 million streams.

I endorse this message.  Very good song.  From their most recent album, 2017's A Black Mile to the Surface.  But then the second and third most popular tracks for the band are both from 2009's Mean Everything to Nothing, which are more like, uh, emo punk?  Yelping rough vocals and taut guitar like Gaslight Anthem or Dashboard Confessional.  Here is the band's second most listened to track, "Shake It Out," with 8.1 million streams.

Still a pretty good song, although I think I'd prefer the more chilled out sound to the older emo rock thing.  One more tune, their most recent one, before I go dig into who the band is and what they are doing.  Brand new single, "No Hard Feelings," released in March 2018, and so far with 525k streams.

That is actually a cover of an Avett Brothers song.  And it makes me want to get all emotional and hug my dog and tearfully sob into his fur as I recall loss.  Oh criminy, I was making a joke, and then I read the second comment on the YouTube video for that song, which is from someone saying that this song made them feel slightly better in the end of their fight with cancer, and so I just randomly cried at my desk for real while listening to this song.  Stupid freaking cancer.  Lovely tune though.

And by the way, other songs on the Black Mile album get to rockin', now that I've run through the whole catalog here, know that its not all tender Iron and Wine vibing.  "The Moth" kinda jams.  In fact, that whole album is very good, bouncing back and forth between the two sides of this band's sound.  I very much like the chilled sound like "The Gold" and "The Alien," but also enjoy the rawk.  This album is good enough for me to save it in my Spotify Q.

2014's HOPE is actually a little like an Avett Brothers sound - especially on "Girl Harbor" - or Ray LaMontaigne sound.  Then 2013's COPE goes more rock and roll, driving guitars.  Ah, ha!  Actually, those two albums are the same songs, just two different versions of the songs - rocking COPE and acoustic/chilled HOPE.  Interesting.  I like both of them - kind of cool to take rock and roll and strip off the sneer to reveal the emotional core beneath.  Neat to put them side by side.  I really like COPE, got some punk and emo elements.

So who is this band?  Interesting that they are from Atlanta.  Their name immediately brings to mind the Madchester scene, with like, the string section from "Bittersweet Symphony" as a constant portion of the band, but instead they are pretty distinctly American sounding.  The main guy, Andy Hull, says that he was 16 when he formed the band, and was super into The Smiths, who are from Manchester, and then the Orchestra part came in because he wanted to make it clear that he was the conductor of the band of high school kids, and others could come and go like a regular orchestra.  Weird, but OK.  I can guarantee you my band names I came up with at age 16 were waaaay dumber than that.  I wanted a tattoo of a toaster for crying out loud.

Odd factoid, they apparently created the soundtrack to the super weird movie Swiss Army Man.  That movie was no good.  Harry Potter fart factory was not even the strangest part of it.  Another factoid, clap me on the back because I predicted this band would come to ACL.  I am a knower of things.

I'd definitely sign up to go see these guys play their show.  Right up in my wheelhouse.