#ragc

[midwestisolation]

i am but a kitchen sink a place to make the others clean

[transgenderpete]

Mother I noticed, one of the men on the cross was allowed to come down

— The Church of the Good Thief - Right Away, Great Captain!

[idiottkid]

it must have been a month since you last loved me. and I haven't slept a wink I hope you care

[khoistop100]

# 28 Church of the Good Thief - Right Away, Great Captain

    You would think that after three reviews about a single guy I would run out of things to say. Seeing as I still have yet to review my favorite Andy Hull album and I have to defend picking this album over Manchester Orchestra’s Simple Math (mostly to my brother, the only person I really get into it over music with), I still have a solid amount to say about the writing and music of Andy Hull.

    When looking at albums on the star system, Simple Math is a five star album no doubt. Much like I’m Like a Virgin Losing a Child, Simple Math is a very solid album with some great moments on it, mainly Deer, Pensacola (very bouncy, fun, not common for Manchester Orchestra), Pale Black Eye, Simple Math, and Leave It Alone. Yet when comparing it to I’m Like a Virgin, it doesn’t have the same level of diversity, that is to say, it doesn’t go from Sleeper 1972 (a song that barely moves through time on account of it being totally engulfed in mourning) to Golden Ticket (loud and almost indignant, with this undertone of longing that makes the song seem near but also far away). Now, it is easy to justify picking I’m Like a Virgin over Simple Math, since both are five star albums. Church of the Good Thief is four star, four and a half tops. Only about half of the songs are stellar, the other half are sort of run of the mill and unspectacular, but the peaks are so high for me, personally. The songs Blame, When I Met Death, Fur Stop Caring, I Wait For You, and Barely Bit Me are all great, with Blame and Fur Stop Caring standing out as particularly excellent.

    Blame, as I’ve said before, was the first song I heard by Right Away, Great Captain and remains one of the best. For one, the song has the most exposition of any of Right Away, Great Captain’s songs. It surmises the plot thus far, talking about the how the narrator murdered his brother after he caught his brother sleeping with his wife. The poetry in which Hull describes this moment in time is truly wonderful. “This house was my flowered heart, my petals have fallen/ if you love him tell me now and I’ll show you my scars.” It’s hallowed and forsaken in ways that I feel like only Hull can really hit and if that’s bias because he has already established himself as one of my favorite songwriters then fine, I just think he’s brilliant.

    Speaking of hallowed, Fur Stop Caring, a song that, like Mess Inside by The Mountain Goats, almost always gets me teary-eyed. In this song, the narrator is dealing with a ghost, be it his captain or his wife. “Shaking like a man should never shake I pulled a coin out from my breast, pretending it could change you” and “Stupid is as stupid does and stupidly I pulled the plug on you/ finally stopped beating/ stupid is as stupid does and somehow you’ll forgive the both of us/ the load that we still carry.” The most one I find that’s impacted me the most, recently, is “and from the shadow to the light/the God I know could not be tired/ but I am such a separate story.” I had the story of the Good Thief explained to me and it got me thinking about this project again. The story, in short, Jesus was crucified with two thieves. One of the thieves talked smack about Jesus while another while the other said that he believed that Jesus truly was the son of God. That thief, the good thief, was saved and sent to heaven. In one moment, a single moment of faith was enough to save someone for eternity. On the opposite side, we have the sailor from this story. Theoretically, his life was entirely good before this one act of rage and evil. Does that, then, define his life or does the entire life of good outweigh his one moment of bad. However, if the sailor’s life is seen as just a long list of bad and failure, the idea of a “Church of the Good Thief” would make since, as the sailor’s only hope for salvation would be to believe that God can forgive if you truly have a change of heart at the end of your life (I just want to shout out my wonderful girlfriend at the time of writing this. She’s super patient when it comes to telling me all about Christianity, as she was raised in an uber-Christian home and I was not. It’s wonderful to see work I already love in a new light, as Christianity is something so many artists are forced to grow up and deal with. I really appreciate her patience and top tier storytelling and her because she’s a great girl and great friend and a wonderful girlfriend).

    The Church of the Good Thief is not a perfect album but it has enough great songs that it’s a must listen for any fans of Andy Hull or storytelling over acoustic guitar. At its best, it’s an album that can echo in your heart, forever.

[khoistop100]

# 27 The Eventually Home - Right Away, Great Captain

    Andy Hull is like a musical Swiss army knife. He whispers or shouts, fires on all cylinders and stops time, and while this versatility appears on all of his works, it’s really on full display on Manchester Orchestra first album, I’m Like A Virgin Losing A Child. Andy Hull is the front man for Manchester Orchestra, Bad Books, and Right Away, Great Captain, all groups that appear on my list. So when I say that the Mountain Goats are my favorite band I mean it but when I say Andy Hull is my favorite musician that is also true. Between his songwriting and the way he’s able to manipulate atmosphere, it’s hard for me to picture anyone else doing what he does.

    And what he did on his first record with Manchester Orchestra is create a rock album as diverse yet consistent as they come. Whether the album is jamming on tracks like Wolves at Night or The Neighborhood is Bleeding or turning the everything down to a zero on songs like Sleeper 1972 or Don’t Let Them See You Cry, the album’s quality is not only great but has no weak spots for me. Even some of my favorite albums, I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside, Tallahassee, Aquemini, hell even my favorite Manchester Orchestra album, Mean Everything to Nothing, hits a few bumps. But to have an album that, not only has no low points, but only have songs that are thoroughly enjoyable in their own right is incredible (for instance, Zaz’s slef titled album has no outright low points but that’s because many of the songs end up sounding interchangeable. It’s technically consistent but not in the same way). However, the album lacks a six star song, a track that transcends music for a person and exists just as this beautiful thing in their heart and memory forever. I can only list a dozen or so songs that I would consider six stars off the top of my head, so not having a six star song isn’t really a knock against an album, but when comparing a totally consistent album (I’m Like A Virgin Losing a Child) to a very consistent album with a six star (Mean Everything to Nothing), I’ll take the album with the higher peak (which is why American Football made it onto the list but that’s for another day)(not to mention a lot of the songs on Mean Everything to Nothing are simply better than songs on Like a Virgin).

    Back to the album at hand, the biggest through line that keeps the album rocking is Andy Hull’s songwriting and voice (stay with me, this review is about to go a little off the rails). If we measure fiction and fantasy on a scale of totally realistic fiction (say, almost any contemporary sitcom) to something completely fanatical (like Dune, a universe that has almost no connection to ours), there’s this middle ground that is, essentially, our reality mixed in with a little bit of the fantastical. A good example is Pan’s Labyrinth, and a lot of Andy Hull’s music hits a point of mysticism just below where Pan’s Labyrinth is. On Like A Virgin Losing A Child, it allows him to mix in these Biblical themes that all mostly go over my head, seeing as I was raised Buddhist, but remain interesting to me all the same. Take one of my favorite songs on the album, I Can Barely Breathe. I read it as this kind of rapture like second coming of the flood that absolved the world back in Noah’s days, a damp and dark time. Yet there is this personability to the song, the anger in lines like “I watched the beauties, watched the fire/ and watched the fire burn the beauty in their eyes” to then contrast that with the quiet “If you knew I was dying would it change you?” (which the music accompanies brilliantly) gives a life to the song. Even in songs on the album that seem entrenched in reality like Sleeper 1972 seem haunted and hallowed in a real way, as if the ghosts in the songs exist in the world of the song and the one in which you’re hearing it.

    There are just so many gems on here, be it the great opener, Wolves At Night, or underrated tracks like The Neighborhood is Bleeding and Golden Ticket, but I would be remiss if I failed to give a little love to my favorite Manchester Orchestra closer by a mile, Colly Strings. The song is this love story that switches perspective every stanza or so (something he’d go on to nail again on the Bad Books track Pytor). But what gets me every time are simply the images that compose the picture the song paints: “bourbon brown that can burn my eyes” and “a pink t-shirt and khaki pants” and “a pseudo-boy that would rather wear a blouse”. They’re disorganized and sporadic and are just part of this love that hurts but that’s supposed to be the point “Don’t stop stop calling, you’re the reason I love losing sleep/ and the building collapse, we’re so shop worn, we’re shop worn for something.” Hull chooses to make these off-fictional worlds where, still, nothing works. Nothing will work in any world, real or otherwise, but dealing with that dysfunction is what makes life worth living. Whether it be the lost souls on The Mountain Goats’ All Hail West Texas or the shattered hearts that litter I’m Like A Virgin Losing A Child, we have music to help us understand that the world is broken and ugly and we get to, not just live with it, but thrive in it. At the end of the day, that’s why I like this album and Andy Hull as a writer, because good music reminds me what life can be and what music can be.

[b4g3l-h0le]

“Finally,” he wrote, “a chance to recall.”

[swifty-fox]

bitches like my cause my music taste is full of whimsy

"The album trilogy chronicles a 17th-century sailor who catches his wife and brother having an affair. He then sets out to sea instead of confronting the two while the anger slowly builds in him. The rest of the trilogy tells the tale of the sailor finding the "Great Captain" who is the namesake of the band, trying to cope with the betrayal, becoming addicted to opiates, and eventually killing his brother in the heat of the moment.[1]"

[asailorsdrunkeneulogy]

Right Away, Great Captain! || I Wait For You