Manchester Orchestra - A Black Mile to the Surface (July 28, 2017) Album • Page 172

Every time I hear "The Parts" I can't help but think about that awful review of the album where the reviewer said the echo effect takes away from the intimacy in his voice. It adds so much more intimacy to the song!

 

Radiohead is a good stop gap before going back to MO though, for sure

 

I, ummm....

I've never listened to a Radiohead album all the way through. *ducks*

 

No way! You need to get on that ASAP. Most of their albums flow beautifully.

 

tell me where to start and I'll do it, it's just always seemed really daunting. shoot me a PM if we don't want to derail too much.

 

Will do

 

Performing on NPR's World Café. I saw the "Setlist" and got really excited, but they only played the usual (The Gold, The Parts, The Alien). It's gonna suck if these are the only three new songs they tour.

Manchester Orchestra On World Cafe

 

I'd be totally fine with them doing something like TBS did after Tidal Wave came out where they play the new record Front to Back, and have a second set with additional songs.

Records like this don't come out often, this record is something special and flows so well. The thought of random songs off of it in a setlist, or any of them not being played sucks!

 

I'm assuming they'll at least do The Alien into The Sunshine into The Grocery. They can't not.

 

They should just play it through.

 

At a minimum they'll have to do that! At a minimum!!

 

They did The Maze too, no?

 

I don't know if this was already known, or just speculated, but:

"Hull told me ['The Gold'] was inspired by The Homestake, a shuttered gold mine in Lead, South Dakota. He wrote the song from the perspective of a woman whose husband worked deep in the mine every day . . . a black mile to the surface."

 

So if it ends up being a tie in the elimination, do you guys want to do what they usually do, which is vote both off?

 

I'm fine with that, because you'd think that the other song would probably be the next one out next anyway

 

They played clips of the album versions of The Maze and The Silence, but not live. The other three were live.

 

Andy played The Maze (or at least the first half of it) solo/acoustic between sets at last year's Stuffing. It was pretty wild hearing the album version for the first time last week, ha.

 

Wow, the same 2 have been tied since 6 responses and now we're at 45 responses.

 

im guessing its the parts and the mistake that are being eliminated rn

 

I bet the mistake is one of them

 

I entered every contest I could find to try and win tickets to that Killers show tonight haha. Have fun!

 

Sorry it didn't work out for you! but thanks! Should be a great time. It's my first time seeing them so I'm really excited right now.

 

i can safely put this band right up there with some of my all time favorites now. i put this album down for a little bit just so i didnt wear it out i mean ive had it for like 3 months of just non-stop listening but i just want to listen to this thing all the time.

this is a weird comparison but this album kinda reminds me of METN in the way that i get the same feeling from both of these albums. i know Andys kinda only passively mentioned this but ive always felt like METN had a story within it as well and this album almost feels like the companion piece to METN. the biggest difference is musically METN is louder with some quieter moments throughout while ABM is quieter with louder moments throughout.

im just real happy this band released this and im real happy youre all enjoying it

 

Well folks, this is probably the closest we will get until I speak with him.

@teebs41 @Bo Joiner

Manchester Orchestra Know That Winter Is Coming


"So, on ...Black Mile's "Lead, SD," when Hull first hints at the disaster to come on "The Grocery," the character has collapsed into Hull, and Hull has collapsed into himself. "Is it temporary? I don't think I want to be a dad / Nobody knew today would be the day he loses it."

"Like I would ever write that," Hull says now. "In my mind, it was from a character's perspective. But after I wrote that thing I was like, 'Oh yeah, that character's just the dude who thought the exact same way you were thinking.' And then that really started to open up.""

"If there is a wall between Hull and his characters on ...Black Mile, it's made out of tracing paper. On "The Grocery," he sings over some troublingly pretty guitars, "You walk into the grocery / And unload several rounds / 'Don't you dare move a muscle / Cardboard cutout ads.'" This is character work. Hull told me last year, when the song was in its infancy, that he'd written "a song about a kid who's working at a grocery store, whose girlfriend was pregnant[...] and someone comes into the grocery store and shoots up the grocery store." But here he slips between voices. In the midst of the song's shooting, Hull sings, "I want to feel the way your father felt, was it easy for belief? / I want to know if there's a higher love he saw that I can't see." Hull's father's faith has always run through Manchester Orchestra records, often as a way of highlighting Hull's own questions and crises of theology. He's in the grocery store too.

"The Grocery" is the conclusion of a mid-album trilogy of tracks that should go down as Manchester Orchestra's greatest musical achievement. "The Alien," the album's first single, is one of Hull's most affecting pieces of narrative storytelling, a story of a car crash in his imagined Lead. It touches on small-town insularity, guilt, the supernatural, and family, but again, Hull is completely present—car crashes have always consumed him. "The Sunshine" bridges the gap with more hallucination—"I already know that I don't already know / You are the sunlight"—before "The Grocery" shifts the location but asks similar in new ways. Chord structures and melodies are only gentle variations on a theme throughout the three songs; the only real change is texture."

 

this is a fucking nutso good record, people. wow, i really cannot turn it off or be anything but awed by its concept, execution or consistency.