cockbeard wrote:

Ooh, I wonder why Tribe didn't pop up, maybe I had scrobbling turned off for some reason

2# Manchester Orchestra – A Black Mile to the Surface

For Manchester Orchestra’s fifth album (or sixth if you include Hope, the quartet’s ‘quieter’ re-imagining of their unapologetically driving hard-rock opus Cope) song-writer Andy Hull wanted to take the Atlanta quartet in a different direction. Alongside his brother-in-law and guitarist Robert McDowell, he spent the best part of a year re-establishing and re-defining the sonic palette from which Manchester Orchestra operated. It was broadly an exercise in doing the reverse of whatever came to them naturally, and in doing so, Manchester Orchestra have composed not only their best album to date but a career-defining epic that defies simple categorisation.

A Black Mile to the Surface is an extraordinarily rare breed of album, a deeply rich tapestry that can be enjoyed immensely at a surface level but reveals a whole multitude of deeper intricacies and hidden depths over time. It’s an other-worldly, enigmatic record, whilst also being profoundly personal, particularly in the themes that emerge through Hull entering fatherhood. Two such songs bookend the album; ‘The Maze’ opens proceedings with a post-modern lullaby written from the perspective of Hull’s baby daughter in which she goads him into being a decent father, whilst the album concludes with ‘The Silence’ recounting Hull’s deep-rooted fears of passing hereditary habits and vices on to his innocent baby girl.

That’s not to mention the unceasing three-song arc of ‘The Alien’, ’The Sunshine’ and ‘The Grocery‘ which provides the album’s stunning centrepiece or the conceptual narrative that interweaves throughout Hull’s personal story about a real-life neutron-science experiment taking place a mile beneath a town called Lead in South Dakota that is attempting to better understand the nature of matter and the evolution of the universe. There’s so much to discover in A Black Mile To The Surface, it will doubtless take years for all its secrets to be revealed and attempting to unravel them is about as engaging and thrilling as music gets.