Are Manchester Orchestra really from Manchester? And was the coronation of Charles really about God?
A new record by a favourite American band of mine triggered a week of wondering about what we're to do about faith language that makes us squirm.
For someone who grew up in a faith community and later become a theologian to make sense of a tragic event, I struggle to think about faith matters these days, until a band like Manchester Orchestra pop up on my radar, as they did again recently with the release of a new record, The Valley of Vision.
Manchester Orchestra aren't from Manchester and they're not an orchestra. They're a typical four-piece rock band from Atlanta, Georgia (the Bible belt), who took their name from my hometown, Manchester, England — because the music of the city was what leader and singer Andy Hull was listening to when the band was formed.
The Valley of Vision is a superb EP of songs left over from recording sessions that led to their previous album, The Million Masks of God, released in 2021. That album is also terrific, especially the first four tracks, and it's the one I've been playing most often over the past week. One line of one song in particular keeps hitting me in the face, from the track Let It Storm: "I don't want to hold back my faith anymore."
Perhaps this happens to you too — the one thing you really don’t want to think about, you're made to think about because of a song lyric, or a line in a book, or a piece of dialogue in a movie, which ends up saying what you wanted to say all along if it hadn’t remained buried in your subconscious. I seriously don't want to think about faith right now, then I hear that lyric and I find myself echoing its sentiment — not verbally, but somewhere deep inside. I don't want to hold back my faith anymore.
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