Atlanta-based indie-rock all stars Manchester Orchestra composed of rhythm guitarist-singer-songwriter Andy Hull, lead guitarist Robert McDowell, bassist Andy Prince and drummer Tim Very will shortly release their lush sixth album “The Million Masks of God”.It is a true pleasure and joy to finally share the first piece of music from our sixth full length album “The Million Masks of God”. It’s near impossible to put into words what this album means to us on a personal level. I’m amazed and grateful at how so much hard work from so many incredible people ended up working together to finally get us here. I’m so happy it’s here. This record, what it’s about and what it represents holds a particularly intimate place in our hearts. Writing it, creating it, building it, destroying it and rebuilding it together over the last two and a half years has been the most gratifying challenge of our career so far. I hope that you enjoy it as much as we enjoyed creating it. Thank you for your continued support of our band. We can’t wait to go on this next journey together.
This exclusive vinyl variant is 140g on “sea blue.” The Million Masks of God is limited to only 500 copies,
As part of the forthcoming Frightened Rabbit’s covers album Tiny Changes: A Celebration Of The Midnight Organ Fight, Manchester Orchestra, and Sarah Silverman & Katie Harkin have released covers of the Scottish band’s “My Backwards Walk.”
The first cover is from Sleater-Kinney touring member Harkin, with the help of comedian and actress Silverman. Silverman was a good friend of Frightened Rabbit’s frontman Scott Hutchison, who passed away in 2018 after the band went on a 10-year anniversary tour for the album. The duo’s cover is slow, filled with synths. and puts the melancholic and nostalgic lyrics of the song at the forefront. The duo sing, “I’m working on erasing you / Just don’t have the proper tools / I get hammered, forget that you exist / There’s no way I’m forgetting this.”
Similarly, The Atlanta-based indie-rock band Manchester Orchestra focus on the poignant lyrics, but instead give the song a fuller, more cinematic sound. The song opens with frontman Andy Hull softly singing as the backing music builds to the climactic breakdown of the track.
To celebrate the 10 year anniversary/birthday of The Midnight Organ Fight we wanted to avoid the usual approach of just repressing the vinyl or re-releasing the same record with different artwork or putting out demos that were never meant to be heard by anyone other than the band and maybe our parents. We came up with the idea of asking some pals to record their own interpretations of the songs on the album. It felt like a good way to celebrate everyone who had been a part of the last ten years of the band and we didn’t have to do any work ourselves! Every single person on Tiny Changes has been a part of our lives and Frightened Rabbit in a special way over the last ten years. We’ve shared studios, vans, bars, dressing rooms and probably even underwear with some of these people and that’s why this record is so special to us.
Scott was a vital part of bringing this album together and it’s something he was very excited about and worked hard to bring to life. He listened to and approved every track on there with us and he had already started preparing the artwork which you’ll see on there (if you buy it). This is a celebration of a record that connected thousands of people to Scott and connected thousands of people to each other and ten years on it is still managing to do it. Scott would probably have put in some joke here about when the album hits puberty and starts rebelling by smoking weed and getting things pierced. We’re not that funny so instead let’s just raise a glass, blow out the candles and make a wish.
Prior to the release of these “My Backwards Walk” covers, indie singer-songwriter Julien Baker and Scottish rockers Biffy Clyro released covers of “Modern Leper,” The Midnight Organ Fight’s opening track.
The compilation album arrives July 12th via Canvasback Music/Atlantic and will also feature covers by The National’s Aaron Dessner, CHVRCHES’ Lauren Mayberry, Josh Ritter, Death Cab for Cuties’ Benjamin Gibbard, The Hold Steady’s Craig Finn and many more. The album will not only commemorate the 10-year anniversary of Frightened Rabbit’s album, but also serve as a memoriam to Hutchison, who had helped envision the covers album before his death.
Accompanying the release of the album, Rough Trade will hold an event hosted by Talkhouse’s Josh Modell. The event will feature Finn and Grammy Award-winning producer Peter Katis. Katis was the producer for Frightened Rabbit’s original The Midnight Organ Fight.
Atlanta indie-rockers Manchester Orchestra have teamed up with New Jersey emo-outfit The Front Bottoms on a brand new track. Both bands are widely adored indie bands Manchester Orchestra and The Front Bottoms have united for a collaborative new track called “Allentown.”
The single features lead singers Andy Hull and Brian Sella alternating between verses, melodies, and perspectives as the pensive track builds into a quirky, foggy slow jam. “Allentown” also features debut guest vocals from Hull’s daughter Mayzie and Kevin Devine’s daughter Edie.
The Front Bottoms and Manchester Orchestra’s official audio stream for their track ‘Allentown’.
Manchester Orchestra and Julien Baker cover Pedro The Lion’s “Bad Things To Such Good People” Recorded in Manchester Orchestra’s studio outside Atlanta, GA — and produced by Andy Hull, bandmate/co-writer Robert McDowell, and Julien Baker.
Hull details the cover’s origin: “This song has held a deep weight with me since I was 16, and my awe of Bazan’s songwriting has never died down. It does what so few others can accomplish by painting a detailed and powerful world with minimal words, and allowing the listener to do the rest of the work. And working with Julien was an incredible experience…After meeting digitally and discussing how we could collaborate, we knew we had to do a Pedro song, and it suddenly clicked when she suggested this one. We met in person for the first time about 30 minutes before we started sketching out our re-creation. It didn’t take me but about five minutes to realize just how deeply talented and layered Julien is. I’ve called her ‘the truth’ ever since our first sessions and look forward to working with her as much as we can in the future.”
Net proceeds from sales and streaming will be donated to1 Million 4 Anna, a Foundation dedicated to Anna Basso with the mission to eradicate Ewing sarcoma. The Foundation’s main initiative is to fund promising Ewing sarcoma research, and also provides college scholarships for survivors as well as support to families with a family member receiving treatment.
Last year, beloved Atlanta alt-rockers Manchester Orchestra explored their softer side on an excellent sixth studio album, A Black Mile To The Surface. For Black Friday Record Store Day, they’re releasing a vinyl with six demo versions of songs from that record. The Black Miles Demos will be shoppable in the form of a 12” LP and will feature the following songs: “I Know How To Speak,” “It’s Amazing,” “The Gold,” “No Ears,” “Each Part” and “Amplified In The Silence.” Move fast if you want one: There are only 2000 limited edition in existence!
6 track Opaque Flume Coloured Vinyl featuring the demos for Black Mile. These are the initial, rough-around-the edges recordings, done with one microphone in some distant and often strange locations before they were continued to be worked on in Asheville, NC at Echo Mountain studio
“We’re a band that loves to use heavy, crunchy guitars,” says frontman Andy Hull. “We wondered how we could limit the use of that, so that when the guitars come in they can be creative and impactful. For Swiss Army Man [a Sundance hit the boys worked on] we had to make seventy minutes of music with our hands tied behind our backs. When you’re creating all the sounds you need just from the human voice, it allows you to rethink what is possible, and determine what is really needed. We wanted to make an album in a ‘ non-Manchester’ way if there is such a thing.”
Phoebe Bridgers gave indie rock a shot in the arm last year with the wonderful “Stranger In The Alps”, the Los Angeles musician’s debut album – she became one of our favorite artists of 2017, and her song “Funeral” was among our most played tracks of the year’s roundup. Today, she’s back with a beautiful cover of “The Gold” by Manchester Orchestra, and contrary to the title, the Elliott Smith-harkening song is about a relationship that’s lost its lustre
Phoebe’s cover of Manchester Orchestra‘s “The Gold,” the excellent single from last year’s A Black Mile to the Surface.Phoebe doesn’t change the song up too drastically, but she performs it in that same intimate, instantly-gripping way that she performs her own music, and really makes the song sound like one of her own (as she has done with other covers, like the Mark Kozelek song she did for her great 2017 album Stranger in the Alps.
Manchester Orchestra – “The Gold (Phoebe Bridgers Version),” out now on Dead Oceans Records.
They may hail from Atlanta, Georgia, but Manchester Orchestra’s British indie rock influences — certainly not limited to their band name — spill out all over their fifth full-length album. Their sound doesn’t derive from the airtight punk influences of decades past; rather, there’s an anthemic, widescreen feel to nearly every song on A Black Mile to the Surface.
Over a decade on from their debut, Manchester Orchestra still easily strike the fear of God into their listeners. The Andy Hull-led project has never been about quiet devastation – it’s about the extremities of the emotional spectrum and the internal conflicts that come with going there. “The Gold” immediately asserted itself as a career-best track for the band in the lead-up to the release of A Black Mile to the Surface. Indeed, as excellent as that record was, it never quite scaled the same heights elsewhere on its tracklisting. Heavenly harmonies, heart-on-sleeve lyrics and strikingly-beautiful arrangements: “The Gold,”
“The Gold” tumbles along with an intricate, syncopated beat, occasionally stopping dead in its tracks as Hull emotes the hook: “I believed you were crazy / You believe that you loved me.” Elsewhere a dark, almost apocalyptic feel invades songs like “The Moth”, where the intertwining guitar and drums loom over the vocals, creating an urgent texture. “There’s a way out / There’s a way in,” Hull repeats insistently.
Manchester Orchestra — singer/songwriter/guitarist Andy Hull, lead guitarist Robert McDowell, bassist Andy Prince, and drummer Tim Very — bring a great deal of skill and vitality to their rock formula.
The band occasionally dials down the dramatics in favor of more low-key arrangements, such as on “The Alien”, where the heavy surrealism of the lyrics is paired up with indie folk tropes like muted drums and a heavy acoustic vibe. The song wraps up with a dream-like coda that somehow evokes the hypnotic harmonies of Elliott Smith. Clearly, Manchester Orchestra have their influences cut out for them. “The Part”, one of the album’s eloquent highlights, is all heavily reverberated vocals accompanied by stark acoustic guitar. The song’s chorus (“I still want to know each part of you”) is simple and unadorned but underscores the deep level of emotion the band is working with.
A Black Mile to the Surface may get knocked for being a downer, an almost self-conscious one. But for all the melodrama, there’s plenty of smart arrangements and well-crafted musical ideas released on July 29th, 2017 through Loma Vista Recordings
It’s just as well then that while A Black Mile to the Surface certainly feels like one of the band’s most expansive, and ultimately uplifting, records, it still harbours the undercurrent of darkness and unease that’s an inherent part of Manchester Orchestra. And with tracks like “The Sunshine” blossoming with an understated optimism, the record’s afforded an emotional balance unseen on previous albums, suggesting a further evolution for a band who refuse to rest on their laurels.
Such is their inability to settle in to a groove, that A Black Mile to the Surface is the product of the band’s writing and recording process being turned completely on its head, purposefully pushing themselves to second guess each decision in a bid to create “an album in a ‘non-Manchester’ way”. As a result, the record feels far more cinematic than anything they’ve released before; the influence of singer/guitarist Andy Hull and co-writer/multi-instrumentalist Robert McDowell’s work on 2016 Sundance film Swiss Army Man evident in the hypnotic ebb and flow of “The Mistake”, or in the finger-picked throb of “The Moth”.
Such a grandiose aesthetic is helped here through the production efforts of John Congleton (Explosions In the Sky) and Catherine Marks (The Killers); the two establishing an equilibrium between the elaborate soundscapes of the former, and the bombast of the latter. Rather than fall in to self-indulgence however, A Black Mile to the Surface feels richly nuanced, offering up something new on every repeat listen.
And you will want to play it again. Probably as soon as you’ve heard it the first time. From the emotive resplendence of opening track “The Maze”, a subtly building opener that gently coaxes listeners in, to the tribal thump of the seven-minute epic “The Silence” that plays the record out, every aspect of A Black Mile to the Surface is ambitious and rarely, if ever, does it falter. And though they’ve certainly succeeded in their goal of making an album in a ‘non-Manchester’ way, it fits perfectly in their Manchester Orchestra canon as a stunning evolution of a band who aren’t afraid to test themselves.
Kevin Devine one of the most prolific singer-songwriters in the punk and indie rock world, and an artist who had released six studio albums to critical acclaim. With two Billboard charting albums Brothers Blood and the later Between the Concreteand the Clouds was hesitant about using crowd-sourcing platform Kickstarter to fund the release of his seventh and eighth LPs.
But, as odd as it felt to fund an album with support directly from his fans, he was also disillusioned by his experiences in the traditional label system. In the late months of 2012, as he continued to write, Kevin Devine’s uneasiness with the Kickstarter model began to recede. He proceeded with the belief that he would be doing something different and true, placing his trust in the audience to guide him.
“I’ve made six records. In America they’ve been released on five different labels. It’s a pretty unstable industry. What’s made it a sustainable and justifiable career for me has been the audience and their close, passionate connection to the music.”
His fans responded. Devine met his $50,000 target funding within only 8 hours of the 45-day campaign, and ultimately fans pitched in to the tune of $114,805, more than double his initial goal. The funds resulted in the simultaneous release of “Bulldozer”, which is laced with folk-rock and pop ballads, and was produced by Rob Schnapf (Elliot Smith, Beck and Guided By Voices) and Bubblegum, produced by Jesse Lacey of Brand New, an uptempo record with feedback, loud fuzz guitars and catchy hooks. Essentially, a proper rock and roll record.
The two album project that explored drastically different sounds was a massive undertaking, and it was released to great success. Both albums charted on the Billboard charts simultaneously and both were the highest-charting positions of Devine’s career to date. Hitting Nos. 2 and 3 on the Heatseekers chart. The single “Bubblegum” charted for a month on SiriusXM’s Alt Nation Alt18 chart . He took his new material on the road in North America, the UK, Europe and Australia, and the LPs delivered the greatest critical reception of Devine’s music to date.
Devine continued his support of Bulldozer and Bubblegum with the release of a 7″ single featuring the song “She Can See Me,” the one track Devine wrote twice; a version for Bulldozer and a version for Bubblegum. The She Can See Me 7″ was released via Bad Timing Records, Devinyl Records and Favorite Gentlemen Recording . This partnership between the three companies will continue throughout 2015 with both new and previously released music.
Melbourne rockers APES have just completed a small UK tour supporting Manchester Orchestra and with a few dates in their own rite, a few months ago their debut track “Pull The Trigger” a indie killer song with memorable guitar riffs
The Fat Angel Sings 