thread of best rock album of year 2017, 'a black mile to the surface' by manchester orchestra

you know what song stopped me dead in my tracks the other day, was "you wouldn't have to ask" by bad books

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-KcNBY83CI

anyway I am still unbelievably stoked for this album

god "you wouldn't have to ask" is the best fucking song ever written

that great

has anyone tried mixing "keel timing" and "bed head" into one song? because I do this in my head all the time

surprising no one, i discovered today that i've been really underrating simple math since it came out

my second fave after black mile now

MA at their most MOR? not that I'm complaining. I get pearl jam vibes on occasion

I pretend it starts with "pensacola" tbh, first songs feel like a throat clearing to me

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-R4gSeY0XtY

very black mile, gorgeous song

it's out there

holy cow "inaudible" sounds incredible

heard a new song on the radio, was really good

oh wow the second half is A Moon Shaped Pool-core emo, here for this

or at least that's how "dinosaur" struck me

this is the best album ever

Lol.

Is it out tomorrow then?

'tis

surprising no one, i discovered today that i've been really underrating simple math since it came out

― mellon collie and the infinite bradness (BradNelson)

Brad, the first time I listened to Simple Math, I cried. Great album, great title track, great music video.

Man, I'm so glad that I've (finally) Got Friends that like Manchester Orchestra. Andy Hull is one of my favorite musicians alive, and I really love how distinct his voice is. Then again, I also love Coheed and Cambria and many people find Claudio difficult to listen to.

And I'm so behind that I didn't realize that he had a side project with freakin' Kevin Devine.

this album is so rad. i a/b’d it with black mile today, i think black mile is so close to a platonically perfect album from these guys for me that it’s hard to measure up, like... “the moth” and “lead, sd” are like these rocking engines of dread and i’m still totally blown away by them. and “the grocery” and “the mistake” are the two best manchester orchestra songs of all time

but this album comes really fucking close. my favorite is “obstacle” and i cannot believe they managed to hit this balance between inward acoustic guitar stuff and full prog bridges but that’s what really impresses me about “dinosaur” and “obstacle”

Cope/Hope -> Black Mile felt like a seismic shift to me, just a huge shift in scale and level of execution. this otoh feels more like Black Mile II than I was expecting, and not just because of the little reprises. andy is such a confident singer now that, ironically, it leads me to pay more attention to the lyrics, and his constant first-person passionate stadium yearning feels like it has sacrificed a bit of specificity. but it's v v good and the songs you cite show some real growth. otoh I would absolutely kill for a whole album of "keel timing" / "bed head" style actual pop-adjacent stuff, those are amazing songs

i don’t even really know the details of the overlapping recursively constructed storylines on black mile but relistening to the record today i was taken aback by how emotionally devastating certain lines from that record are, often bc they seem to revolve around this inexorable horrible thing happening or having happened. ugh what a powerful album. glad i made a thread for it lol

yeah I never even remotely grokked the "concept" of that album (even by concept album standards, hull's are super vague and evasive to me) but it's incredibly cohesive, and feels unified by the "you can't take it with you" theme. it's not clear to me what the driving force of this one is by comparison, though I did read about the grief angle.

I doubt we'll get a better *sounding* rock record this year, I will say that. this thing sparkles!

fun to see you on my other music message board, simon. the quality of discourse there really makes ilx look like the fucking algonquin table in comparison

hahaha yeah it is WILD there huh? I'm just getting the lay of the land

it’s really nice that we don’t talk about vinyl variants constantly here

I got drunk and listened to this last night and MAN, this album flowed beautifully. Felt very complete as an album, but Manchester Orchestra usually doesn't miss as far as album building. Every single song fits perfectly.

where's the other board? i wanna check it out

no it’s better that you don’t know

well, it may not be quite as good as black mile to me but i'm fully obsessed with this record

"keel timing" is such a banger and i don't think i fully recognized that before i heard the whole thing

I feel you, Brad. I don't know if I happened to be in the right headspace for this album (Million Masks, I mean) to really resonate in me, but MAN, I've found myself drifting back to it over and over this weekend and listening to it IN ITS ENTIRETY.

"let it storm" -> "dinosaur" -> "obstacle" -> "way back," aka the sequence where every song seems to be even better than the last

omg this album. the back to back of "keel timing" and "bed head"!

"obstacle" is just lovely.

the guitar solo in "the internet"!

one of my favorite moments on the record def

once again playing this record and thinking "wow i sure love this record"

first few listens to this album i would get "keel timing" stuck in my head and then it would morph into "bed head," which, the two songs are similar by design, and there are several twinned songs on this record ("dinosaur" and "obstacle" are two others imo) and even between this record and black mile ("the mistake" seems to get revived in a different register at the end of "angel of death"; "the internet" is clearly a variation on "the silence," also i think the song titles are meant to be opposites which makes me lol). i was unsure how i felt about this at first, like, shouldn't these songs have more of their own identity, but i've found that it's really drawn me in deeper to the world of the record

oh the verses of "annie" also seems to rhyme with "the mistake"

i guess you'd think all these inter-song echoes would make the world of each record feel narrower but it actually makes it bigger, like the low-key mysticism people find in coincidence

I can't help but long for a little more specificity in Andy's lyrics...like I would never have had any idea about the "concept" aspects were it not for extramusical interview chatter and internet speculation. mostly I hear a lot of first-person angst from a bunch of undifferentiated "characters"

ironically I think I notice this more now because he's grown so much as a vocalist

the concept of the album is not as huge and ranging as a black mile, it is just about contending with death afaict... it makes it less impressive(?) lyrically but some of it still really strikes me ("daddy's at the hospital / the gator finally got him")

i guess i'm going through the whole discography again

That's not a bad idea. Listening to Mean Everything To Nothing is good for me anytime and all the time.

i’m like a virgin is a really good record but the production... isn’t amazing. very 2006 dry and brittle indie rock tones. annoyed that the acoustic tracks are mastered at a different volume than the rest of the record. i know people who still think is their best, which i think i understand... there’s this eerie open-ended feeling that persists through the second half. but it’s also just a little rickety compared to the fully-formed albums that come after it. maybe i’d feel different if i’d heard it at the time, i only got into it in the last few years

i've been listening to mean everything to nothing since 2009 (i checked it out because i saw manchester orchestra open for brand new in san jose and ... didn't quite know if i liked them or not) so it's hard for me to think any new things about it. it's a really great record, production is incredible, guitar tones are perfect warm buzzes especially on "in my teeth" and they start doing that built to spill-esque overdriven dual guitar effect i love dearly on both this album and simple math. really weirdly constructed, it shifts gears about five times in the opening run and then settles into a kind of suite of gentle epics in the second half from "i can feel a hot one" to "the river." i read an interview with hull where he said he recorded the vocals when he was sick so they would sound as shredded as possible so now i can't stop thinking about that when i'm listening, thanks andy

Surprised there's been no Pitchfork review of this yet

still listening to this like once a day

"bed head" song of the year

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fj2hSxy8kbU

Really liking this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrAURfbK8Ls