![]() ![]() The Swiss Army Man OST comes out while I'm overseas, attempting to 'expand my borders' e.g. The less said about Cope the better, but with a small application of selective amnesia I can confidently declare that Manchester Orchestra have a perfect discography – maybe the only one, although in a few months I'll retract that when I finally wake up to Elliott Smith and all the horrifically lonely nights of listening that entails. Andy Hull and his lyrics, the essence of hyper-sensitivity to every little thing distilled onto paper, all my overreactions and overthinkings and fuckups in their purest form. But anyway, it's I'm Like a Virgin Losing a Child, their weird, awkward debut that ends up digging its claws in the deepest – the crushing depression of "Sleeper 1972", "Where Have You Been?" and its agonisingly drawn-out coda of religious/sexual desperation, "Colly Strings" with a touchingly honest story of give-and-take love that I'm still years and years out from experiencing, forget anywhere close to understanding. The title track keeps drawing me back to it, like it has gravitational pull: that one bit where the strings soar like an eagle underneath Andy exclaiming what if you believed me, everything is brilliant? somehow feels like everything is really gonna be alright forever, even as the extreme anxiety that will, starting next year, dominate every second of my social interactions is beginning to creep and creep. Then Simple Math is out, and for some reason I rip it track by track from the stream by recording into Audacity – ugh, I know – and start listening. First The Dear Hunter drop "Deny It All" in anticipation of The Colour Spectrum, and hearing Casey and Andy on the same song straight up nearly stops my heart. One year on, and after the combined events of early 2011 I'm pretty damn close to obsession. But the details aren't important: see, I'm not shallow like the other kids, no, I'm a real deep teenager so I'm all about the feeling, man – the way "I've Got Friends" skewers its kind of cheesy, kind of sickly pop sensibilities into something a little darker and a little nastier, always underpinned by that $2 keyboard twinkle. These are the pre-Spotify days when YouTube is regarded as a kind of acceptable way to find new music, and Manchester Orchestra pop up probably as a related video from a Dear Hunter song or something. againĬirca 2010 or so, "I've Got Friends" is playing on a shitty YouTube rip through my shitty laptop speakers in my room. ![]()
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