manchester orchestra simple math lyrics album

Their biggest attempt to move toward opus-level songcraft? Live strings, which pop up on virtually every track, poking around the crevices and adding grandiose glue.

But Simple Math does feel sonically unified, working a consistent template throughout its 45 minutes: electric guitars alternating between distorted, palm-muted power chords and lightly spacey arpeggios, a sturdy rhythm section underpinning Hull’s emotive nerd-rock harmonies. Hull describes this 10-track effort as a concept album “about a 23-year old who questions everything from marriage to love to religion to sex,” but it’s difficult to suss out a unifying thread from his lyrics, which can be distractingly generic (“What if it was true that all we thought was right was wrong?” goes one bit of cornball philosophizing). For those who were put off by their relentless shape-shifting, that bit of news is a good thing. In the two years that separate Mean Everything to Nothing and their follow-up, Simple Math, Manchester Orchestra seem to have-gulp-figured out what sort of band they want to be. “Steal big or go home” seemed to be the motto of the moment. And, more importantly, they had the energy and the creativity to back up their horseplay. Singer-songwriter Andy Hull seemed hell-bent on tackling every trademarked form of rock composition, and while that fact may have resulted in a curious identity crisis, there was a winsome, borderline tongue-in-cheek quality to the whole affair that seemed to imply the band weren’t taking themselves all that seriously. Absolutely nothing they did was original, with the Atlanta quintet plagiarizing their way through rock history, lifting from Bright Eyes’ hyper-literate folk one minute and Nirvana’s tuneful alt-grunge the next. Part of what made Mean Everything to Nothing, Manchester Orchestra’s sophomore coming out party, such a dynamic and attention-grabbing effort was its strict dedication to sonic theft.

Manchester orchestra simple math lyrics album