Manchester Orchestra
Manchester Orchestra’s sophomore effort lives up to the band’s potential

Review By Matt Conner

Believe it or not, Manchester Orchestra doesn’t want to be household names. At least not yet. Of course, in the wake of its sophomore album, Mean Everything to Nothing, that might all change.

Fame and buzz found Andy Hull, the group’s primary songwriter early. The high school student opted to stay home for his senior year to focus on his craft and friends joined soon thereafter. In 2007, the band issued its first full-length, I’m Like A Virgin Losing A Child, and actualized its potential. The result included late night appearances on Letterman and Conan and TV placements on indie TV shows like Gossip Girl.

Yet to hear Jeremiah Edmond, the band’s drummer and eldest member at 25-years-old, tell it, the journey is just now beginning. For Edmond and the rest of Manchester Orchestra, Mean Everything to Nothing, truly displays what the quintet is capable of.

“This is the first time we've been able to have an album where we were prepared for everyone to hear and prepared to really get behind it,” Edmond says via phone. “When we made I'm Like A Virgin Losing A Child, we made it just because we needed to make it. It was much more just for us. We decided to make an album, put it out there on our own and see what happens. When it started to really take off and gain momentum, it was very cool, but we certainly didn't expect that for that album. It wasn't the album that we were ready for the world to see us with. But this album is that album. We're now ready to say, 'This is what we can do. This is what we've been working on. This is who we are.' And we're completely proud of that and we're ready to present it with confidence.”

Most of that confidence comes with the experience gained playing high profile gigs and over 200 shows a year for the last few years. As Edmond explains, it’s about learning to trust your band mates.
“The new album is a little more cohesive than our last album,” he says. “You'll still find all the same elements and we're still the same band, but after playing on the road together every single night for 200 plus shows, there are these intangible things that happen. You learn how to read each other and play with each other better. You learn what each member is going to do and where he will lean with his playing style. I think as a result, we're able to write songs where we play off each other's strengths better.”

Sonically, the tracks on Mean Everything to Nothing are darker and more intense than what Manchester fans might be accustomed to. It’s the natural evolution for a band finding who they are and what they’re capable of creating, as well as learning to dig deeper into spiritual and emotional themes.

“Because we're used to playing live, the songs become a bit more aggressive as opposed to if you're writing them at choir volume in the rehearsal space in the studio, they might not take on that same aggressive nature,” Edmond explains. “A lot of these songs came from what we're doing live, so it's more aggressive overall. It's also darker at times but they are still pop songs no matter how you mask them. Andy always writes these great pop melodies and no matter what we mask them with, that's what is at the core.”

After a long wait to properly establish a firm foundation, this promising act is poised to capitalize in a big way in 2009. And it’s something the band seems quite aware of. Perhaps more than most, Manchester Orchestra is a band that knows exactly where it wants to go and how it needs to get there.

“Once we were making Virgin and starting to have some sort of team around us with management and starting to get attention, we made it very clear to everyone on our team and everyone on board that we did not want to blow up,” Edmond says. “We didn't want to do this large push or marketing campaign, especially for that album. We knew that we weren't ready for that. We weren't at that point. We didn't deserve that yet. We needed to be out on the road, grinding it out, paying our dues and learning to get better before we did anything like that. We didn't want to be a flash-in-the-pan, but instead we wanted a long career. The best way to set ourselves up for that was to do a slow build and really bring fans on over time and really earn the fans and their respect and their support. So now we're ready to pick it up a bit. We've been out there paying our dues and building momentum, and I think we're now ready to take it to that next step.”