Together for less than two years, and about to embark on a US tour with fellow Atlanta residents Annuals, the Manchester Orchestra deliver their debut album following a lone EP in 2005. Undisputed guiding light, singer and songwriter Andy Hull spent his last year of school age being home educated in order to concentrate on his writing and recording. Free from the distractions of cheerleaders, all those long corridors lined with lockers, inspirational and unfeasibly good looking teachers, and such. Well, it would appear he still, just about, got a straight A in English. There’s a maturity and interest in the writing on offer here. The music, however, is more uneven, and often detracts rather than complements.

Wolves At Night kicks things off with an attention grabbing intro of off-kilter clattering drums over scratchy guitar and Vincent Price organ. A verse progresses encouragingly but then, as all too often, songs are marred by climactic choruses that wallow in lazy crashing cymbal and power guitar – not quite Orson/Busted territory, but getting there. It’s a formula that repeats. Songs such as The Neighborhood Is Bleeding and I Can Barely Breathe are constructed with faint echoes of Death Cab For Cutie in style and vocals. The pattern is broken by fourth track I Can Feel Your Pain – a whispered contemplative solo over acoustic guitar that alone summons up some sense of origin from the South. There’s a short, similar, attempt later that is less successful.

Where Have You Been finally presses all the right buttons, the question being addressed to that most elusive of emotions: joy, wailed over a pow-wow drum and subdued multi-layered choral backing. Regrettably we’re back to the formula for the following number, but Sleeper 1972 (one of a couple of nods to Woody Allen by Hull) is the emotional fulcrum of the album. Opening with “When my Dad died, the worms they ate out both his eyes”, funereal organ meanders throughout beneath spiritual lyrics. Golden Ticket has chiming Snow Patrol guitar breaks segregating plaintive verses, while elongated closer Colly Strings has the album’s most powerful vocals delivered across sullen drums exploding into a bombastic massed guitar finale that ultimately fails to maintain emotional intensity.

Maybe I’m old school in believing that the music should do the talking, but I am put off by any band actively advertising for street team members on their web site. Hull says that “The concept of the record is sort of my loss… My realization that I don’t have control over anything. And that’s a good thing.” Well, it’s not a good thing if the marketing men have got some musical control and are pressing for the forays into the commercial routine that hamstring this album. He continues “The last line of the song [Colly Strings] is ‘You can’t believe without bleeding.’ For me that stands really true. It’s like you can’t understand life without having to fall and fail. I think that I’m doing something right and have a good concept on the world and I’ll fall again and realize I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about”. With an average age of 19, time is definitely on their side and there’s room for optimism. It’s a first album shy of enough to leave them with heads raised above the indie masses right now, but don’t rule it out for the future.
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Links
Manchester Orchestra [official site] [myspace]