60 mm Tortex picksĬope’s evolutionary leap was accomplished in part by looking back to those same decades, too-a time when rock guitar’s territory was wide enough to encompass the subterranean growl of the Jesus and Mary Chain, the 6-string howl of Dinosaur Jr.’s J Mascis and Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan, and the frayed harmonic declamations of Sonic Youth and Glenn Branca. T-style with a Seymour Duncan Little ’59 bridge pickupĮrnie Ball 2220 Power Slinky sets (.011–.048) He channels his airy tenor into rising and falling melodies-a trick he learned from one of his ’80s and ’90s post-punk heroes, Morrissey, whose hometown of Manchester, England, inspired the group’s name. Hull’s voice also lends a buoyance to the band dynamic. Everybody was on the same page every step of the way in making this album, and as we put together the songs in the studio things just fell into place exactly how they needed to.” “We’re at a point as a band where the hooks come out naturally in every song,” Hull explains. Manchester Orchestra seems so instinctually adept at upholding those values that they’re able to build a sing-along vibe into the neurosis of “Indentions,” which starts with a church burning and chews on lines like, “It doesn’t matter to me … I tell myself repeatedly/What a nightmare it seemed to honestly think of anything.” Then there’s the gift for hooks, melodies, and harmonies that’s deep in Hull’s and his bandmates’ collective DNA. His gift for interior perception makes offerings like “The Mansion,” about a lost, hollow-hearted soul, and “The Ocean,” a roiling tribute to futility, seem nakedly genuine and haunted. Few songwriters today have Hull’s psychic pipeline into the minds of his characters. The trick was layering as many as 10 guitar tracks on each tune, all slightly varied in tone and execution so that, even when Hull and McDowell played the same chords, their varied picking, amp choices, and instruments created small differences that make the combined tracks pulse like a hive.Īlthough Cope does stand up on its hind legs and beat its chest, its noise also comes from mental static. “But this album is as relentless as our live shows.” “A lot of people who've never seen us live think of us as playing pretty music-which we do, and we enjoy,” notes Hull. After all, those hits were fueled by the post-Cobain mantra of alternating loud and soft dynamics in support of melodic pirouettes that soften the edge of Hull’s lyrics. To listeners casually familiar with the band through breakthrough tunes like 2006’s “Wolves at Night” or 2011’s “Simple Math,” Cope may seem like a radical departure. But what the album truly sounds like is a creative breakthrough for the uncannily hardworking Atlanta quintet that’s propelled by the dual 6-string thrust of Hull and Robert McDowell, childhood friends and kindred spirits who do for post-atomic-age rock guitar what gospel-raised Southern siblings like the Louvin Brothers did for close harmonies. Those may seem like abstractions, but the supremely overdriven sound of the new Manchester Orchestra album, Cope-which frontman Andy Hull describes with a single word, “brutal”-puts gravel in their bellies. A surging tsunami ridden by Homer’s Sirens as they call Odysseus and his men toward a volatile fate. Tectonic plates slowly grinding over a fault line of pickups.
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