“It’s nice to be back in our hometown,” Manchester Orchestra frontman Andy Hull jokes on his band’s annoyingly-difficult-to-explain moniker in front of a packed audience at the city’s Academy.
To get the difficult bit out of the way: the band aren’t a recent addition to the city’s lineage of The Smiths, Oasis et al and they aren’t bolstered by 20 people gathered around sheet music playing brass and strings.
They are, however, one of the most exciting alternative rock bands to emerge from America this decade, led by a maestro whose lyrics hinge on love, loss and religion, punctuated with a frailty rarely seen between such meaty slabs of fuzzy guitar.
The preconceptions of any strangers duly shattered with wry laughs from knowing fans in the audience sensing the irony, Hull is free to launch into a sold-out show in support of recently released fourth album Cope.
The Atlanta, Georgia, five-piece, with newly-appointed replacements on bass and drums, have split critics during their ten-year tenure – at their best hailed as saviours of guitar-rock, at their worst derided as three-chord charlatans.
Whereas a fourth album on the back of such division may have prompted some bands to change direction, Manchester Orchestra stuck to their guns – quitting their major label deal and going it alone in an effort to record an album exactly how they wanted.
The result is an ear-splitting power trip of searing riffs and Hull’s distinctive piercing vocals wailing on the title track that, ‘I hope that if there is one thing I let go, it is the way that we cope’.
It’s a statement from the band to stand up to adversity and it’s worked as the album arguably shows the group at their best since 2009’s Mean Everything to Nothing.
Show opener Shake It Out, taken from that album, is heavy buzzsaw guitar and raw passion – the kind of raw, unabridged, from-the-heart passion that makes you forget Hull looks like a Northern Quarter socialite and the bassist a Led Zep reject as you allow your soul to absorb every screamed word of the ‘shake it out’ refrain.
It’s a telling marker of the relentless ferocity to come, with the band barely pausing for breath until Hull’s solo endeavour on break-up song 100 Dollars – still managing to end on vicious guitar strums which seem to stem from real, steaming inner venom.
While the themes and religious metaphors expressed through Hull’s lyrics together with the quiet-LOUD-quiet-LOUD patterns throughout each record may stick in the throat for some at home, it’s live where the band come into their own.
It’s a place where you can forgive yourself for forgetting about breaking boundaries and treading new ground and appreciate a band being really, really good at what they do.
In a time when so much impetus is put on the craziest distortion, the wackiest melodies, the loudest feedback, it’s refreshing to hear something sounding so tight and so similar to the record you know and love.
The packed crowd are muted: not for lack of admiration for the musicianship on show, but quite the opposite.
Awe is the order of the day with many standing dead still, silently mouthing lyrics back up to Hull like karaoke goldfish.
For a Friday night crowd to obey and observe all evening would be too much to ask, and it’s not long before Hull is forced to bat down a front-rower trying to film on an iPhone with surprising humour.
“Shut that down,” he laughed, before finding himself in an impromptu sketch with guitarist Robert McDowell about their ‘tough day’, and the first world problem of not being able to get Wi-Fi on their phones.
Top Notch, from Cope, is the first track of a four-song encore where the crowd sense the end and arms begin to flail over the first six rows.
Closer Where Have You Been? From 2006’s I’m Like a Virgin Losing a Child is perhaps a surprise finale, if only for the fact it is one of the most low-key performances of the night.
No body-shuddering volume on show here, but a seemingly note perfect sing-along of ‘God, where have you been?’
And praise be, the religious sceptics are fooled; because tonight the good church of Manchester Orchestra had the whole audience worshipping at their feet.
Image courtesy of Milkaisindifferent, via Flickr, with thanks
