After listening to I'm Like a Virgin Losing a Child and over 150 other MO/Andy Hull b sides, side projects, live recordings, etc non stop for nearly two years... Well, let's just say that I had high expectations for this new cd. I'll start by saying that in small town Mississippi, record stores are few and their selection is very limited. I had planned on buying METN online but I walked into the store and saw both vinyl and cds. The vinyl was only ten dollars so I decided to buy that (because you're never going to beat that price, right?) and buy the cd later. When I got to my car I was ecstatic to see that it came with a free cd. So I want to thank Manchester Orchestra for doing that. There's no reason to pay for music fifteen different times. After following youtube videos for months, very few of the songs were new to me. I wasn't quite sure what to think of the album at first (I just thought they'd turned up the distortion) but after my third listen I realized that MO has truly found its voice. I could definitely tell that this was more of a team effort than ILAVLAC. Some of the songs on ILAVLAC felt like Andy wrote a song and the rest of the band just kind of added on their parts. METN felt more like the songs grew with the entire band's input at every stage of the songwriting process.

Basically, I've been pleased with the new cd and if it wasn't for mewithoutYou's newest, I doubt it would have left my cd player.