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Concert Review: Manchester Orchestra at Music Midtown in Atlanta

“We’re Manchester Orchestra, and we are from…here.”

If you made it out to Atlanta’s Midtown Music Festival and you were in the audience for this local band’s set, you might have noticed the British Flag and the Queen’s portrait swaying in the warm fall breeze. Any confusion was certainly cleared up with that simple intro to themselves as the boys rocked an eager and strong following ready to jam to their favorite tunes.

Mano, as some of the loyalists in the audience call them, got their fixes early with standout performances of “Everything to nothing” and “Shake it out.” Lead singer, Andy Hull and his beard put a spell on the crowd even without much banter other than the obligatory, “How is everybody?” An empathic “F**king fantastic” by the fan beside me summed it up nicely.

The most memorable performance for this reviewer came with “I’ve got friends.” When hull complains, “I’ve got friends in all the right places / I know what they want / and I know they don’t want me to stay,” you wonder if this was a personal statement of angst of his early days at Providence Christian Academy in the suburbs of Atlanta. As the story goes, feelings of alienation caused him to spend his senior year studying at home, while recording his first full length album. But my powers of psychology might have been off on this afternoon.

Of course, “Simple Math,” had to be done, and we were plenty happy to hear one our favorites. Then came “The only one,” where we were taken back to Providence Christian Academy with a clearer picture of where Hull came from:

“I bet you did what you did
when you did it
to do it again
by the time you were done with it
I bet you did what you did
when you did
just to tell every friend that you have
that the Lord did it”

Yeah, I knew it.

Mano gave a powerful set filled with emotion and bravado. The Queen would have definitely been proud; however, she could not be more proud than us here in the ATL.

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