Album Review: Manchester Orchestra - The Million Masks of God (2021)

First things first: Manchester Orchestra are not from Manchester, England. Nor are they from Manchester, anywhere else. Manchester Orchestra are not even an orchestra. They’re an Atlanta, US-based alt-rock four-piece, and the band’s 2021 album, The Million Masks of God, is album number six in a career that dates all the way back to 2004.

Over the course, the band have appeared at big festivals such as Lollapalooza, Coachella, and Reading, and despite having an otherwise relatively low profile outside of their homeland, they’ve clocked up an impressive number of live television performances on US variety/chat shows like the Late Show with David Letterman (4 times), Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, and Jimmy Kimmel Live! … if I hadn’t heard the band’s music, you could say it’s exactly the sort of mainstream rock resume I’d normally be a quite wary of and steer well clear of.

 And yet, here we are, late into 2021, and The Million Masks of God is shaping up to be one of the very best new release albums I’ve heard all year. I’d heard snippets - or singular tracks - lifted from the band’s previous full-length outing A Black Mile to the Surface (2017), all of which left enough of an impression for me to pick up The Million Masks of God almost as soon as it was released.

I initially thought the band might have some loose connection (or shared membership) with Seattle indie-folkers Fleet Foxes, such is the similarity in style, and the frequently layered vocal offerings of singer Andy Hull are not all that dissimilar to those of Fleet Foxes main man, Robin Pecknold. Albeit Pecknold and Fleet Foxes rely more heavily on actual harmonies than filters and studio wizardry such as over-dubbing.

The Million Masks of God feels like an assured and self-aware release, an album with a range of lyrical themes - although death does seem like the most predominant concern - and a blend of musical styles. With Hull’s vocal delivery perhaps becoming the album’s most consistent feature, and arguably, along with clever wordsmithery, the glue that holds it all together.

It’s an album of emotional peaks and troughs, where soft acoustic moments sit comfortably alongside edgier or heavier rock-out flashes. Where grand orchestral flourishes push hard up against what I suspect is the band’s more natural (collective) instinct to just relax and let everything breathe. Where the production is often lush, yet the arrangement occasionally sparse or spacious.

Nothing ever feels too rushed or forced. There’s conflict and contradiction to be found on The Million Masks of God. Equal parts joy and sadness. You get the sense on some songs that Hull is genuinely working through issues as he sings about them. Whether it’s mortality, afterlife, or perhaps that most confusing of life perennials, a human relationship. Searching for an answer without ever really being certain about the question.

Whatever else it is, it’s a brilliant listen, a journey, and a stick-on certainty to be one of this blog’s albums of 2021.

Highlights: ‘Angel of Death’, ‘Bed Head’, ‘Telepath’, ‘Dinosaur’, and ‘The Internet’.