Be devoted to one another in brotherly love. It’s the same devotion Paul exhorts in Romans 12:9: “Love must be sincere. This coupled devotion-toward God and others, rooted in God’s faithfulness and the imago dei-is the passionate heart of the album. You’re the one I wanted, want now, want when I am old.” Hull heralds this devotion on “Telepath”: “In my mind, you are the road I chose to travel / Might as well have been the very last thing I decide.

Specifically, it’s a devotion to God lived out through devotion to others, these masks of God.

It gives Hull the ability to live with the devotion he's clearly longed for-toward his wife and children, toward the memory of loved ones, and toward God. So discovering this solid ground brings a powerful new love. To them, sin not only marks a failure of obedience, but a failure of devotion. Manchester Orchestra have always been concerned with how the imagined sins that pervade their songs wreck the lives of those around them. This solid ground is not the end of the journey, but it marks a transformation which hurtles the focus outward. But it is alive amid them and in spite of them, suffused with the Spirit’s “interloping fire.” The perseverance is captured poignantly on “Obstacle”: “There was laughter in the cold.” On “Let it Storm,” he sings, “I don't want to hold back my faith anymore / I don't want to fall into that man again / I just want to keep both my feet on the floor.' This strengthened faith doesn’t discount the pains of death or stinging doubts.

Through it all, he’s seeking his place in the story, searching for solid ground from which to live fully and intentionally.Īs Masks progresses, Hull seems to find that solid ground. Hull, a pastor's son, has used songwriting to explore the complex dynamics of faith and doubt, sifting through imagined tragedies-bursts of anger, fatal car wrecks, infidelities, the banal shock of a mass shooting-to reflect the looseness he’s felt within his soul. For Hull, this guilt-and his attendant doubts-goes hand in hand with personal failure, a recurring theme throughout Manchester Orchestra’s music (as well as his languid side project, Right Away, Great Captain!). In turn, it aggravates pangs of guilt, whose specter shows up repeatedly. Grief is the angel of death in the passenger seat, the omnipresent obstacle. Hull stated that Masks was a way of “grappling with seeing what my best friend was going through, and me as well trying to process that.” Together, they experience joy and defeat, heartache and beauty-the breadth of existence which they work into Masks. In addition to being bandmates, McDowell and Hull are also brothers-in-law. This loss is real for the band-the album was formed out of the death of guitarist Robert McDowell's father. As lyrics collide and perspectives shift, the audience is immersed in the overwhelming, conflicting emotions of one suffering loss. On “Angel of Death,” the line structure of “It felt like a first, but it wasn’t new / It felt like a sin, it was more like a noose” carries forward into “Annie”: “But it wasn’t engraved, it felt more like a bruise.” Additionally, on “Angel of Death,” Hull sings “If I’m the thief and you’re the proof,” but the roles are reversed on “Annie.” These lines imbue a sense of uncertainty to the early songs. The songs “Angel of Death” and “Annie” are particularly rooted in this circular form. The songwriting itself resembles a whirlwind, as lines are iterated across various tracks, forming structural rhymes, inversions, and repetitions. It’s a daunting attempt, and one that pays off powerfully.

It manages to be eerie, sorrowful, nostalgic, and ultimately redemptive. The sound builds on itself from song to song only to mutate unexpectedly, forming an album that moves fluidly between stadium rock, country-tinged ballads, and ghostly electronic ruminations. To fully express this emotional whirlwind, Manchester Orchestra have crafted their most sonically complex album to date, incorporating elements they’ve experimented with over the years: the heaviness of A Black Mile to the Surface, the grandeur of Cope, the inwardness of Simple Math, the playfulness of Mean Everything to Nothing. The Million Masks of God feels like the project that Manchester Orchestra have always been working toward.įrom the opening lines of “Inaudible,” Masks is most immediately an exploration of loss, particularly the deterioration and death of a parent: “You're inaudible / Thrown away like an audible / Wheel you down to the old folks' home / Are you listening to me?” From there, lead singer Andy Hull works through the cavalcade of emotions that accompanies such loss: the immediate grief the resonant joys of life so intimately shared the guilt of failures the hope and faith of future reunion and also the doubts, both of what eternity means and how life is to go on when shadowed by such a great absence.

Simple math album songs