Review Summary: maybe I did something righ-igh-igh-ight
Stovall is ugly. The guitars crunch like the world on fire. The vocals growl their way through the ends of sentences. The lyrics hurt like biting fingernails. Some tracks slow to a halt to sigh in their own gloom, before bursting the harmonies to screams.
No song is uglier than
Something Right. The narrative follows a man and a car crash—which alone sounds grotesque—but it swerves into another lane. He meets a lovely woman while exchanging insurance. “And even though my insurance is now too high to pay-ay, I got your number, and I'm calling you on Friday. Can't help but think that after all the things that I've done wrong, maybe I did something right. Something right, maybe I did something righ-igh-igh-ight,” he breathes out, no self-awareness. Of course, his lover brutally dumps him. And the story could end there. Except the song breaks to a bridge, and he receives the news that he knocked her up, forcing them back together. “I should've gone to college and got some type of degree cause now I got a second job, and I work like 60 hours a week. And even though all we ever do is fight, I could feel a kicking in your stomach last night. Can't help but think that after all the things that I've done wrong, maybe I did something right.” It’s everything
Manchester Orchestra tried to portray about fatherhood across multiple albums wrapped up into a single tune. For a mere three minutes and twenty-two seconds, the guitars relax, and
Something Right dominates my mind.
Intimate details give Hardy’s words weight: his girlfriend’s nails on his front door, purple post-it notes covered in inspirational quotes, a concealed smile at the car crash site, passing out on the floor. “There was mud on top your favorite shoes. A few more steps, and you'd have made it to your bed, but sometimes a few more steps is hard,” he notes in the title track, before pausing, as if he took the time to shrug in studio. And riffs erupt from dissonant silence.
But don’t sleep on his performance, either. At the end of
Work It Out, he delivers some of the best screams I’ve heard in the last year. The title track similarly features a tremendous rendition. In the same sentence, he shifts from shouts to melodies to screams and back again.
Stovall is ugly and packed with gratuitous details and, honestly, not much more than pissed-off ramblings. But it’s genuine, heartfelt, and original—worth checking out, for sure.
