Manchester Orchestra - Simple Math

This is my first Manchester Orchestra album. It's always a bit of a risk jumping in the middle of someone's discography because you're naturally oblivious to what is (potentially) better material, or in the very least unaware of the band's progress and stylings. Nonetheless the general impression of the band I get is a fondness for strings (I'm sure there's a cheap pun with regard to their name here but I cannot be arsed), mellow rock and sensitivities that place them somewhere in the same bracket as Mumford and Sons or Neil Young. As is to be expected with such a band - Pitchfork have been rather cruel on them in the past. Yet the consensus elsewhere is overwhelmingly positive.

Indeed on opening track 'Deer' the band roll around dustily in atmospherics and the vocal harmonies of Andy Hull, but the lyrics are more than your typical folk artist: "Dear everybody that has paid to see my band / it's still confusing, we'll never understand / I acted like an asshole so my albums would never burn". It's a little too conventional in length and I think could benefit from more tension but it makes for a nice opener - suddenly erupting into 'Mighty' which is all blustered riffs and hectic string backgrounds that sound like Elbow on crack. The intro to the track is particularly surprising, sounding like a Pearl Jam riff.


Now firmly out of any one box of comparisons, 'Pensacola' introduces Neutral Milk Hotel influences - an unpredictable blend of bold indie riffs and acoustic reflections - that I feel are the band at their best: it's not too sanctimonious, it's not too obvious. The crowded chants towards the end really instil a sense of pub-rock that's thankfully the right side of the line between genuine sentiment and Fratellis-aggravation. On 'April Fool' the heavy riffs return but with more focus - even managing to mask over Hull's "I've got that rock and roll!" cries with oodles of credibility.

Yet the orchestra hasn't entirely been put aside - 'Pale Black Eye' is a slowly building strings anthem with an ending that could blow hairs off your head. How quite to restart from that is a challenge, but one that 'Virgin' manages ably with a sturdy, slow drumbeat and riffs lifted from a Pink Floyd album (but the child choir might be responsible for that impression) and if anything it might even out-epic its predecessor. The blusters die down for the title track and it makes for a nice listening experience but I think pulls in the reigns a little too quickly - the strings are nice and particularly in the second half of the track we're reminded of the rich orchestration (that sounds like a bad bandname pun but it wasn't intended to be). It could very well be a grower.

At times though the band suffer from producing instrumentation that's actually so breathtaking that, by surrounding it by 5 other instruments, they become victims of their own diversity: the strings on 'Leave it Alone' are really quite sublime but with the monolithic guitars in the foreground it just sounds drowned out. And yet whilst the tune to 'Apprehension' is one of the simplest and most time-effective, it feels undeveloped and uninteresting, so maybe I don't know what I want. Classic indie minimalism is dabbled with on final track 'Leaky Breaks' in the same vein as Modest Mouse or Death Cab for Cutie - from the whispered, distorted vocals to the moody slow rhythms. Guitar solos do their best spark a uniquity in the record but the subdued howls really plod along for too long and, disappointingly, the album ends in a damp squib.


Whilst it lasted, however, there was a real richness of instrumentation that the band can be proud of. Tracks are simultaneously experimental and guttural, giving us the sense that such music has always been a part of our lives and should continue to be. It starts and ends a little bit weakly but once in its stride there's little that could out-perform this band.

Rating: 7.5/10
Highlights: Pale Black Eye, Pensacola, Virgin, Simple Math, April Fool
Avoid: Apprehension, Leaky Breaks
Artwork Watch: White and grey...geometrics... perhaps a mathematician's wet dream but meh.