One of the tactics that we develop as teenagers is the ability, triggered by wanting to grow up and get out way too fast, to render somewhat ordinary feelings in overwrought terms. Andy Hull, the barely-able-to-legally drink driving force behind Manchester Orchestra, is one such kid. He formed the band in the Atlanta suburbs in his junior year of high school, and the resultant album titles signal his desire to transcend his youth with verbiage: There's the purposefully paradoxical, mildly shocking, and certainly cheesy I'm Like a Virgin Losing a Child, or the 2005 EP You Brainstorm, I Brainstorm, But Brilliance Needs a Good Editor (apparently, album titles are excluded from said editing). Mean Everything to Nothing, the title of the band's latest and best-yet effort, tamps down the dramatics in favor of a pithy phrase drawn from the Young Existentialist's Handbook.
The emotions on Everything still run incredibly high, but the music has gotten much buffer, due no doubt to the band's relentless touring schedule over the past few years. The shift also owes something to the able hand of producer Joe Chiccarelli, who made the Shins sound arena-sized on Wincing the Night Away and manned the wayward ship of My Morning Jacket's Evil Urges, which for all of its ill-considered moves, still at least sounded great. In one interview last year, Hull called Everything "Pinkerton on steroids," and while the latter is certainly true, opening track "The Only One" makes Manchester Orchestra sound a lot more like "Kings of Leon's younger brothers." Like the Followill clan, Southern signifiers are packed tight amidst beefy riffs, with Hull's plaint that "I'm the only son of a pastor I know who does the things I do" substituting youthful angst for the brazen groupie-fucking of the Kings, themselves sons of a preacher man.
"The Only One" opens a solidly rocking first half of Everything, on which the band builds a blazing bulwark of stadium-sized redneck-dread. On "Shake It Out", Hull's lyrics-- voiced in a half-shouted/half-sung timbre that should sound exceedingly familiar by now-- ride a dual-exhaust punk riff to a chorus that just barely stops itself from diving headfirst into hillbilly territory. The title "I've Got Friends" nods backward to No Fences, but Hull is far from sweeping onstage via zipline, wireless mic strapped to his head. On "You, My Pride & Me", the band does an end-around the past 15+ years of emotionally-driven punk and plops down right in grunge territory. Hull may have been three when Bleach dropped, but his voice distantly channels a young and angry Kurt Cobain, and atop a dirge-like Black Sabbath cop to boot. When that monster riff hits, damn if I didn't yearn to pull out my nearly unplayable-for-a-decade-plus-of-scratches copies of Alice in Chains' Facelift and Dirt.
And that's a good thing. Hull may claim in interviews that Weezer and Neutral Milk Hotel (yes, you read that correctly) are major influences on his songwriting, but Everything works best in a Paleolithic rock register, instead of aiming for emo-trained ears. "One Hundred Dollars" attempts to merge Conor Oberst with Barrett Strong's "Money (That's What I Want)", and it's predictably awkward, and thankfully brief. It leads to a second half of Everything on which Hull is still high-strung, but his confusion is consistently tempered by varying degrees of revelation. On the midtempo ballad "My Friend Marcus", Hull tells the story of a friend who lives in his basement because "his father touched more than spirit," while on the title track, he confesses, again in the convoluted, Yoda-esque register of a confused, bright kid, that "Definitely, not the things that I'm seeing, did I think I'd see so instantly." Phew-- for a kid barely able to legally drink, Hull's got the exhaustion of middle age. And that's the thing that both defines Manchester Orchestra at this point, as well as what stops them from being great. When they're satisfied with rocking the fuck out, they do it exceedingly well, but when they try to acquire the adult answers, they'd do well to chill out and enjoy being young.
