As with many young songwriters prone to lyrically oversharing, Manchester Orchestra's Andy Hull has often been paid the loaded compliment of being "precocious." It's a term that implies unfulfilled potential. But now that his latest album, Simple Math, aspires to be a culmination of his prior two bombastically titled and performed LPs, I can revisit them knowing they were fully conceived steps towards the logical endpoint, "a story about a 23-year old who questions everything from marriage to love to religion to sex." In other words, a concept album about the experience of being Andy Hull, written by Andy Hull.
But hell, if there's any Conor Oberst acolyte capable of making The Merrimack to Titus Andronicus' The Monitor, it's Hull. As a frontman, he does his peers proud-- while his astringent, high lonesome warble immediately recalls the Jim James/Ben Bridwell dialect, it's flexible enough to handle both rebel yells and vulnerable self-flagellation. Hull's got a thing for drunken fuck-ups who own up to their failures, though he's far more interested in using it for autobiography rather than storytelling. His belief in his own profundity is kind of endearing as Manchester Orchestra's driving force. It's hard to imagine something like the title track, which uses infidelity as a jumping-off point to question the entire basis of human existence, even standing a chance without it.
The problem lies in where Hull ends and Manchester Orchestra begins, and it's a space populated by lesser sons of the south, post-grunge good ol' boys like 3 Doors Down and Collective Soul-- tellingly, the most immediately hooky riffs of the lot ("April Fool") lay mere inches down the fretboard from those of "Shine", and "Leave It Alone" flirts too briefly with a raw tenderness before diving headfirst into the sugary dross of truck-selling power ballad "The World That I Know".
It's that ponderous alt-rock framework that makes Simple Math such a drag even as the lyrics and production feel like they're racing to out-sensationalize each other. While the burly guitars on "Mighty" and "Pale Black Eye" flex some swamp-rock muscle, as a full outfit, Manchester Orchestra simply plod instead of groove, bogged down by Simple Math's favorite artificial flavor, a charmlessly and coldly recorded string section. It's indicative of Simple Math's overcooking: Most of the time, the band can't find a moment of empty space it doesn't fill with that extra guitar overdub, more string cues, or another intimacy-sapping vocal harmony. Or you get something like "Pensacola", whose stein-swinging coda comes off like a fun idea they were dying to get in somewhere rather than an organic conclusion, to say nothing of its clear resemblance to a Modest Mouse song that happens to be called "Florida".
And then there's "Virgin". It clearly announces itself as Simple Math's "ambitious centerpiece" by going all in on the epic signifiers: daunting strings, a horn section at the bridge, massed vocals, and, of course, a kiddie choir to drive the hook home. But melodically and tonally, they're simply piling onto what, at its core, is an incredibly simple arrangement-- its juddering, drop-D Alice in Chains riff is too repetitive not to be catchy, but taken as a whole, it's the most glaring example of a record that's too quick to cut corners and cheat its way toward unhinged transcendence despite so convincingly having its shit together. Which ultimately is where Simple Math falters despite its admirable ambition; as the saying goes, "men plan, God laughs," and Simple Math is proof that your existential crises and epiphanies can't be micromanaged.
