Manchester Orchestra – Hope

This Time, With Feeling!

Earlier this year, Atlanta’s Manchester Orchestra released Cope, an album where the band’s central goal was to turn everything up to eleven and release a balls to the wall hard rock record. The end product was an intense thirty eight minutes of overdriven guitars, massive drums, and scream along vocals that lives somewhere in the musical spectrum between Weezer and Foo Fighters; arena filling power pop calculated to whip live audiences into a lather.

For their new record, Hope, Manchester Orchestra took the same set of songs from Cope, stripped them of the heavy trappings, slowed them down, and re-imagined them in a more contemplative, (mostly) acoustic form. The resulting tracks are outstanding. Where the previous record felt like a one trick pony after a while, the same sound and the same treatment song after song, Hope explores more musical territory. Judging by the depth and layering of the individual parts and the use of multiple layers on the vocal tracks, the band seems to be less concerned about being able to pull off the Hope version of the songs live.

Without the overdriven guitars from Cope, there is more nuance, more space within the songs. Where the previous record rocked the listener’s face clean off, this one nimbly plays with your emotions and and draws you deeper. The greatest benefit of this additional space is that the listener is now able to experience Andy Hull’s emotive abilities as a singer – the distortion and fuzz on Cope gets in the way of the listener being able to appreciate Hull’s skill as a songwriter and a lyricist.

There are only two songs on the album that fall flat: “Trees” and “Indentions,” the former is dirge-like in it’s pacing and falls victim to it’s own corny lyrical metaphors while the latter is stuck in a repetitive rut and doesn’t go anywhere particularly interesting. The rest of the record is simply wonderful with the songs feeling more fully realized than on the previous effort. Whether this improvement is due to the stylistic differences between Cope and Hope, or if it’s because this is the second stab the band has taken at recording the set –  is impossible to say. The song writing, the performance, and the production is all on point.