Manchester Orchestra and Jimmy Eat World are in the midst of a co-headlining tour together. They’ve been taking turns closing out the shows, and both playing full sets at each stop, and last night (8/23) they stopped in NYC for a Central Park show closed out by Manchester Orchestra. The two make a great pair–both bands come from slightly different musical backgrounds and slightly different eras, but with plenty of musical and generational crossover. They both arrive at some form of emo-adjacent alternative rock, they’re both masterful live bands, and they’ve both got rich catalogs to pull from. Without a proper new album to support for either band (though Manchester did release the six-song mini album The Valley of Vision earlier this year), they took the opportunity to play career-spanning sets, and it was a real treat to see the ways that both of these bands connect the dots between various eras.
Jimmy Eat World opened up in Futures (2004) territory, with the back-to-back punch of “Pain” and “Just Tonight” to kick off the show, and then treated the crowd very early on to one of the biggest singalongs of their career, “Sweetness.” Jim Adkins was encouraging crowd participation right off the bat, and you could tell he was in great spirits all night–as the 47-year-old said on stage, “Getting old isn’t a choice… being an old crotchety bastard is a choice!” He was cracking emo dad jokes (“Why did the emo kid leave the bar? It was happy hour”) and he sounded genuinely grateful to be celebrating the band’s 30th anniversary in Central Park, something he said they never could have imagined when they were starting out. They took “Sweetness” into their Bleed American-esque 2022 single “Something Loud,” and hearing those songs back to back made it very clear that Jimmy Eat World still know how to tap into that energy in a way that’s wholly genuine and never sounds rehashed. They then continued to mix things up between their 1999 emo classic Clarity, 2000s albums Futures and Chase This Light, and the much newer Surviving (2019). They treated every song with the urgency it deserves, and the set never lulled. Songs written 20 years apart sounded great next to each other, and the deep cuts were almost always received just as well as the deep cuts. That is, of course, until set-closer “The Middle,” the one song of the night that I think had every single person in the audience singing along.
The sun had fully set by the time Manchester Orchestra took the stage at 8:40, and the darkness is just what they needed to come out to “Pride,” a doomy highlight of 2009’s Mean Everything To Nothing. That’s a much rawer, heavier record than the band’s latest LP, 2021’s atmospheric, art rock-oriented The Million Masks of God, but Manchester Orchestra connected the dots seamlessly between “Pride” and the two Million Masks of God highlights that immediately followed, “Keel Timing” and “Bed Head.” They didn’t drastically change things, but they clearly took the time to reshape songs to fit into one cohesive setlist that best represents the Manchester Orchestra of 2023. They brought out the atmospheric elements of their heavy songs, and the heavy elements of their atmospheric songs. They reached back to their debut for “I Can Barely Breathe” without it feeling like nostalgia. They inspired a massive singalong to their biggest hit to date (2017’s “The Gold”) without it overshadowing anything else. They took full advantage of the ability to improvise on stage by doing a seamless suite that included “Simple Math,” the ending of “I Can Feel A Hot One,” and “Cope.” And the set ended not with a big hit, but with a climactic, noisy rendition of A Black Mile To The Surface‘s seven-minute closer “The Silence.” It felt like they treated the whole set as an art piece, and all the various eras of their career started to look like pieces of an ongoing puzzle. It makes me really excited to see where they go next.
The show was opened by Middle Kids. Pictures by Emilio Herce and setlists below.
We’ve also got an exclusive sea blue vinyl variant of Manchester Orchestra’s The Valley of Vision available now, limited to 500.
Manchester Orchestra @ Central Park – 8/23/23 Setlist (via)
Pride
Keel Timing
Bed Head
I Can Barely Breathe
Pale Black Eye
The Way
Simple Math (>)
I Can Feel a Hot One (partial) (>)
Cope
The Maze
The Gold
Shake It Out
Dinosaur
The Silence
Jimmy Eat World @ Central Park – 8/23/23 Setlist (via)
Pain
Just Tonight…
Sweetness
Something Loud
For Me This Is Heaven
Kill
Dizzy
555
Lucky Denver Mint
Big Casino
A Praise Chorus
Hear You Me
Blister
Work
23
Bleed American
The Middle
