The Weight of Simple Math

Manchester Orchestra’s third record, Simple Math, arrived in May 2011 and immediately felt like the kind of album you’re supposed to have heard before you needed it. Andy Hull builds these massive, unwieldy rock songs—cathedral-ceiling guitars, drums that hit like architectural decisions—and then fills them with marriage, doubt, religious crisis, the weight of becoming someone you weren’t sure you wanted to become. The title track runs nine minutes of exactly that: a slow accumulation of dread that somehow holds. There’s a moment midway through the record where the noise clears completely and it’s just his voice, and it lands harder than the loud parts do. I kept returning to it in the weeks after it came out, not because I had answers to the questions he was asking, but because it helped to know someone was asking them at that volume.