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

https://soundblab.com/images/albums/Blackmile.jpg

i have listened to this three times in a row today and i kind of feel like it's the best record of its kind since brand new's the devil and god are raging inside me

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaeWss85_vg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hru_Dzv1olM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71U_qjHLM58

looking forward to digging into this

noticed this comparison in the Exclaim rave, might be worth exploring

With songs that are crisp, emotive and hymn-like, Black Mile can prompt admiring comparisons to Band of Horses and My Morning Jacket; it's also probably the closest thing to the little-known yet incredible Clean Head by Oceana, an EP that never got the proper followup it deserved.

Alien -> Sunshine -> Grocery is just absurd

yeah it is!

I wouldn't think to compare this to The Devil and God - it feels much more even-keeled emotionally, dynamically, sonically - but it sure is gorgeous. Is there a good interview or writeup somewhere that talks about the overarching concept or w/ever?

i mean i'm not comparing it sonically, mostly just as really coherent album statement that seems to totally fulfill the band's potential in atmosphere and depth

rock albums assembled in such a way that they seem to get deeper as they go

yeah I can def hear that.

the Oceana EP mentioned in that writeup is actually a pretty apt comparison!

https://open.spotify.com/track/4452im0oupzzOYPHCqcLyx

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQh3k-n_tcQ

this song is so fucking good

the piercing harmonies in "the moth" are like

http://68.media.tumblr.com/d9d94c54bf63885abc4eb0eaeaa2348b/tumblr_otmh5bYkWq1s86mfwo2_250.gif

I'll try these tubes. I still find it weird that the cd I got from them in 2006 (LP2) looks like something they burned themselves

the cd I got from them in 2006 (LP2)

you mean i'm like a virgin losing a child? i've never owned that one but i guess it wouldn't surprise me if its presentation were super austere

i have listened to only this album for the past 24 hours. i have decided the best moment is in "the grocery" is when he sings "this is the onlyyyy. WAYYYYY to go"

I'm still deciding how I feel about the dialed-back intensity but the cohesiveness and command of mood is really impressive

this is great. a band i've been ignoring for years, basically.

i don't really know their earlier stuff. is this one of the better rock bands that the "cool" music press has been ignoring for a decade in favor of declaring rock dead?

With songs that are crisp, emotive and hymn-like, Black Mile can prompt admiring comparisons to Band of Horses and My Morning Jacket; it's also probably the closest thing to the little-known yet incredible Clean Head by Oceana, an EP that never got the proper followup it deserved.

― a serious and fascinating fartist (Simon H.), Friday, July 28, 2017 10:00 AM (three days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I heard a lot of BoH when I listened to this. might just be his vox.

i don't really know their earlier stuff. is this one of the better rock bands that the "cool" music press has been ignoring for a decade in favor of declaring rock dead?

yep!! also if you dig this record you'd probably also like mean everything to nothing

good to know.

def BOH happening, not just in the vox, xpost. i don't mind, i like BOH

yeah i dont mind altho I havent listened to BoH since their 2nd album i dont think.

Lead, SD is really really good and imo very essential to the album

I'm still deciding how I feel about the dialed-back intensity but the cohesiveness and command of mood is really impressive

― a serious and fascinating fartist (Simon H.), Saturday, July 29, 2017 9:32 AM (two days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think the heavier moments on here feel earned, cos of this ^

I'm down w the wall of reverb that closes out the album.

felt weird fastening the word "rock" to the thread title as it applied way more to their previous record, cope, which is pretty paint-peeling and has like 100000 guitars overdubbed on it which consume all of the remaining instruments; this is chamber music in comparison, but the overwhelming sense of dread running through all of their music is sustained on this record and is even kinda dramatically enhanced by the immaculate production

I need to go listen to Cope then

i like how impressionist the lyrics are that's what reminds me the most of devil + god that kind of abstract emo'tion. it's just painfully beautiful at some pts.

brad how have you never forced me to listen to Cope!? this is crazy good. fitting my mood much more rn.

thought this was good
http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/manchester-orchestra-a-black-mile-to-the-surface/

Hull’s been given some serious source material, namely the birth of his daughter and co-writing the mostly a cappella soundtrack for the farcical body comedy Swiss Army Man. One might think exposure to that much real and cinematic flatulence might lighten Hull’s mood a little.

kinda glossed over that part.

no one *ever* talks to me about new music irl (outside of ilxors i'm in touch w/) but sure enough i was at a party on saturday and two friends asked me about seeing manchester orchestra next month. i said to myself, "hey, there was a recent ilx thread about them!" and that i would probably be down.

i like this album, it was made by ppl who understand and love rock albums.

It's funny how much sonic DNA this and the new Brand New wound up sharing

otm

they both sound perfect to me atm

i had not heard about this band until tonight and this album is hella excellent

i have been listening to this nonstop for days.

Way back when, in my limited exposure, I thought this band sounded a bit like a b-list Arcade Fire. I hadn't heard anything from them until this album, which I sought out due to ILX enthusiasm, and ... well, still sort of sounds like AF to me, specifically "The Suburbs," which I like, but I couldn't make it through this album. Maybe it's his voice? I'll give it another shot soon at some point. Want to try to Brand New, too, though I've never heard a note of that band and think I always thought of them as, like, Yellowcard or something.

Should concede that I know next to nothing about "emo" as a genre, short Rites of Spring and Jimmy Eat World, so maybe it's just not for me.

their label's marketing has been effective on social media in that I see reference to this thing non stop all the time, everywhere, despite no one I personally know ever recommending it

i don't really hear anything tying this band to arcade fire but i get hull's voice potentially being a dealbreaker

i regret the thread title but how could i have known that brand new would release a record this year

i like this album, it was made by ppl who understand and love rock albums.

otm

I was not into that brand new lp, but I've never been a fan

xxp - Fleet Foxes is what the singer's voice reminds me of.

i really liked the video for The Gold

A weird album for me. I love the first three tracks and the last four, but the four in the middle don't do anything. It's like a big black hole in the middle of the album. I'll keep trying, maybe they'll grow on me.

the silence and the grocery are just massive

i have decided the best moment is in "the grocery" is when he sings "this is the onlyyyy. WAYYYYY to go"

this, with 'there is nothing you keep, there is only a reflection' in the silence being a close 2nd

"lead, sd" is prob my favorite song of the year

yeah

some of the guitar tones and the more circuitous playing on this record remind me of later red house painters/early sun kil moon

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

new MO number for a DC soundtrack thingie:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OMpofOS85o

this might be a controversial opinion but I think Million Masks is even greater record than A Black Mile to the Surface? It doesn't have highlights like "Lead, SD", but as a whole I think it flows better.

ha, I almost revived this thread to say that on recent revisit I felt an emptiness/hollowness that's difficult to put my finger on, I think it's mainly that I'm struggling to connect with the lyrics. I think by the end I'm also a little worn out by the roaring climaxes

i think i might agree it’s even better than the last one