Note To All Orchestras, You Should Sound More Like This

I was going to continue talking about The Times today, but I've something much more important... A new band!

All the way from Atlanta, Georgia come Manchester Orchestra, indie rock with a bit of everything else thrown in. After hearing about these guys from a friend, and missing out seeing them playing, I went out and got their album. I ended up buying their newest one, Mean Everything To Nothing.



Their sound is a strange mix of almost everything, but it stays together with a sense of continuity. Formed in 2005, we're clearly dealing with proper music fans here... You can hear influcence from Grunge, Shoegaze and Folk, all thrown together, all expertly performed, and the end result is something that will amaze you.

The photo is by a mysterious man called only "Brady" and who has an interesting photo blog. I wonder if it would be possible to do our blog using only photos and still get our style of semi-coherent music reviews across...?

Better the second time around?

Well after a month off, we're back and more indie than ever I suppose.

In The Times newspaper, in which the music reviewers attempted to be "hip" and "with it" in discussing The Horrors new album, they raised an interesting and valid question... How many times has a band's second album better than their first?



Sure, there have been great examples of bands crashing and burning. The more commercial the band, usually the worse they do. There's a ton of bands today, that are favorites of the critics, that aren't going to make an album as well received as their first. And it'll be compared to their first, and they'll be assumed to have lost, whatever it is they had. This is the doom I foresee for bands like MGMT.

The more subtle version of this is when a second album is despised by critics but then goes on to be well received by fans and eventually by critics many, many years later. Good examples of this are Weezer's Pinkerton and BRMC's "Take Them On, On Your Own". Taking this to it's logical conclusion, you get Elbow, who's first album, though not hated by critics, went mostly unnoticed, then 14 years later they come up with The Seldom Seen Kid.

So, what bands do you know who out did themselves the second time around?

Oh, and today's photo is from Jurriaan Persyn, who's a bit of a jazz enthusiast it would seem. And according to last month's poll, radio is dead. I'll go tell those pesky radio presenters to pack it in finally.