As I have mentioned many times before, I somehow went a decade and a half without hearing Manchester Orchestra, despite hearing their name constantly. I decided to change this last year and instantly became a fan.
And just in time too, because shortly after that point, they released The Million Masks of God, a dazzling technicolor spectacular that is as catchy, aggressive, lush, heavy, and emotive as anything they’ve ever released.
I am a relative newcomer to Manchester Orchestra. Despite hearing their name for the greater part of a decade—often while they were touring with some of my favorite bands—I had never listened to them until last year. However, that proved fortuitous in a way, because my discovery happened just before the repress of Simple Math. My initial inquiries suggested that this album was the fan favorite, but high prices on the resale market caused me to ignore it for a bit…which explains my backward path through their discography.
Based on that trajectory, both A Black Mile to the Surface and Cope were far poppier and folkier than I was expecting based on their reputation. Simple Math, however, starts to bring the picture into focus a bit more, marking a turning point from the band’s scrappy origins to their big-budget sheen of newer albums.
The bigger the world gets, the smaller it seems. Take for instance, German alt-rockers Black Swift. I was first introduced to them when my band opened for them on a show of one of their American tours, only to find that the lead singer, Sally Grayson, grew up a short drive away from my hometown.
Then, last week, she embarked on a solo tour that stopped in my living room (alongside ex-Sixpence None the Richer/Velour 100 alum Tess Wiley). It was there, stripped away from the fuzzy guitars and leather jacket drums, that the power of her voice and songwriting became inescapable.
On paper, slowcore giants Low don’t seem like the most obvious candidates for an Americana album. This is especially true for those of us who came to the band through the glitchy, atmospheric noise project Double Negative and worked their way backwards through their sparse soundscapes.
And while this album and Double Negative are as dissimilar to one another as anything else in the Low catalog, C’Mon delivers the same sort of minimalist compositions, just augmented by lap steels, fiddles, banjos instead of effects pedals and synthesizers.
The one thing that truly set Thrice apart from the throngs of other early-to-mid -00s post-hardcore bands was the ability of lead singer Dustin Kensrue to craft great choruses. Even at their moshiest, there was a pop sensibility that displayed a deep appreciation for blues, folk, and classic R&B that demanded singalong.
Even as they’ve expanded their sonic palette to incorporate elements of post rock, sludge metal, and electronica, his love of roots music has remained central. Beggars may be the only album in history to cite both Isis and Billie Holiday as influences.
With this in mind, longtime Thrice fans should find no surprises in his 2015 solo record Carry the Fire, a relatively subdued pop record that finds him embracing these elements without the need for hardcore catharsis.
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As much as I love old-school shoegaze and new wave, I might enjoy it just as much when the punks lay down their aggressive downstrokes and power chords to reappropriate those sounds and moods in earnest.
Granted, neither Hopesfall nor Celebrity have exactly shied away from integrating these retro influences in their brands of post-hardcore. Even at their heaviest, they’ve retained a sense of tunefulness and melancholy that recall bands like New Order, My Bloody Valentine, and of course The Cure.
But when members of those projects join forces to delve more sincerely honor those influences, the result is magical.
Across their near twenty-five year career, The Appleseed Cast has cemented themselves as a band that can do no wrong. Their work has consistently exceeded expectations, pushing their songwriting, instrumental performances, and inventive production to the limit with each release.
But what’s sometimes difficult to remember is just how quickly they jumped to that level, as seen by their 2000 full-length Mare Vitalis, a masterwork that demonstrates the group’s ability to blend emo expressiveness and post-rock atmospherics, seasoned with some bursts of post-hardcore to taste.
I recently wrote about how surprised I was to discover that Manchester Orchestra had a thick layer of folksiness on top of what I was expecting to be an emo-leaning catalog.
The most jarring part of that realization came as a result of seeing a number of tracks from A Black Mile to the Surface in their top tracks on Spotify and deciding to start there. And boy, was the stripped down, Gospel tinged “The Maze” a huge wake-up call. In fact, I’m pretty sure that song has played on my Fleet Foxes Pandora station…
After I got over the shattering of my expectations of what Manchester Orchestra was, I found myself listening to an incredibly rewarding album. While not every track is quite as subdued or rustic, that sensibility covers even the most aggressive songs on this disc.
A few months ago, I realized that despite years of guest features, tours with bands I love, and general cultural osmosis, I had never actually knowingly listened to Manchester Orchestra.
A shocking omission, I know. And I’m not totally sure how I managed to pull it off. But upon the realization, I set off to correct it as soon as I could. Which proved to be a daunting task—with five full lengths, several EPs, and a number of collaborative projects, Andy Hull & Co. has made a massive impact on the indiesphere (massive enough for me to feel like I was already a fan, in fact).
In the twenty-five years since the release of You’d Prefer an Astronaut, the musical landscape has been filled with bands that exist at the altar of HUM. The combination of doom metal heaviness, laid back vocal delivery, and major key melodies that HUM delivered on that breakthrough has inspired everyone from Deftones to Cave In to Quicksand to Cloakroom to Spotlights to The Life & Times to True Widow…I could go on.
But now, two decades after going on hiatus, HUM has released a new record that proves that they’re still the kings of space rock. And it might just be their best ever.