Manchester Orchestra's Bio
Mean Everything to Nothing, the second album from Atlanta's Manchester Orchestra, is everything you want a rock record to be: raw, urgent, emotional, and 100 percent authentic. "There is nothing fake about this record," says frontman and lyricist Andy Hull. "There's not one fake sound on it. We recorded it live because we wanted it to sound like a band, and I think it does: live and loud!"
Inspired by the pounding, primal assault of Weezer's Pinkerton , Nirvana's In Utero , and Foo Fighters' The Colour and the Shape , this young band has created its own version of what a classic rock album should sound like, complete with fiercely beautiful melodies, shifting guitar and keyboard textures, loud/soft dynamics, and an urgency in each band member's performance, especially Hull's cathartic vocals.
The drama is magnified by the fact that the album's first six songs bleed into one another without stopping. The blistering opener "The Only One" immediately gives way to the propulsive "Shake It Out" and the torrential first single "I've Got Friends," followed by the anguished "Pride" and the menacing "In My Teeth," before slowing down on the darkly funny "100 Dollars." Then the album pauses and down-shifts into less relentless yet equally gripping territory on songs from "I Can Feel A Hot One" (which was featured on Gossip Girl last September), to the ruminative closer "The River."
The breakneck pace is both exhilarating and exhausting, which Hull says was intentional. "I like the fact that there isn't a chance during the first six songs to say anything if you're listening to it with somebody. It's seamless. We did that to emphasize that there are two halves to the album." The first half is a brooding tale of teenage angst and anger -- the confusion and disillusionment of growing up and becoming an adult. The second half is about redemption and an overall re-evaluation of the self. It's about Hull beginning to realize in his own words "that things are not ok, I am not ok, and there's a beauty in that -- a calming, a forgiveness," he says.
A fully realized album, Mean Everything To Nothing is the sound of a band coming into its own after spending 300 days on the road in support of their debut album, 2007's I'm Like A Virgin Losing A Child -- a coming-of-age chronicle that expressed the then 19-year-old Hull's hopes and aspirations as he sought spiritual knowledge. Virgin was an attention-getting shot across the bow that Rolling Stone praised as "expansive in scope and rich in texture, even while remaining lyrically focused on small moments of revelation" and the New York Times called "music to swoon to." But whereas the songs on the debut were voiced by a fictional cast of characters that Hull created to obscure his own emotions, the intensely personal songs on Mean Everything To Nothing are all him. "I was able to be more honest when singing as someone else," admits Hull, who is now 22. "Now I've realized, although it's incredibly difficult, it's more powerful to just say it myself."
www.TheManchesterOrchestra.com
