Album Review: Manchester Orchestra - A Black Mile To The Surface

Just 13 years into an already enviable career, Andy Hull and Robert McDowell are captaining Manchester Orchestra's fifth through troublesome waters.

Scoring the Danno/Radcliffe vehicle Swiss Army Man using mostly a cappella and minimal orchestral sounds has reinvigorated the band's love of its guitar section, which is delicately draped over Hull's fragile vocals in The Parts and scalds with Foals-ish intensity on The Silence. When The Grocery wanders from a grey apartment block in search for a higher power to believe in it's hard to imagine this is a band from Atlanta, Georgia not Brexit-wounded Blighty. A Black Mile To The Surface is as brittle as it is powerful.