Manic Street Preachers - The Welsh variant of Britpop

It's easy to say Britpop. It's easy to slap that label on every band from the UK with at least a hint of melody in their sound that found success, or at least drew attention, in the first half of the Nineties. As a rule, every label used to categorize musical output ends up lumping together artists who often have little or nothing in common, and Britpop is no exception: over time it has been applied to artists who fit its canon only partially, or not at all. Manic Street Preachers undoubtedly belong among the latter, despite their British origins, despite their pronounced melodic streak, and despite the fact that one of their most important songs, "A Design For Life", features an interplay of strings and guitar arpeggios that would become the most defining element of Britpop's final phase, the one driven by "Urban Hymns" by The Verve.

First and foremost, it's the Welsh band's whole imagery that stands worlds apart from the scene that nonetheless managed to leave its own mark on the past decade. When the Manics made their full-length debut in 1992, the dominant trend was to make things more pop, with bands like Charlatans, Inspiral Carpets and Blur themselves, that strand known as Madchester, which had thousands of kids dancing to the rhythms of Happy Mondays, Stone Roses and even New Order.

An immediately explosive start, full of personality

Against a backdrop like this, the Manics' debut, Generation Terrorists, stands decidedly apart, because the vast majority of its songs are indeed melodic, but marked by a fairly hard-edged rock sound, especially in the rhythm section, with an arrangement style that closely recalls hard rock; synthetic sounds appear only in the reworking of "Repeat", a track also present on the album in its guitar version. James Dean Bradfield's voice is clean, yes, but also very raspy, as are the guitars of Bradfield himself and Richey Edwards, while the rhythm section, with Nicky Wire on bass and Sean Moore on drums, doesn't go in for flights of fancy but underpins the sound and melodies in a compact, full-bodied way.

We mentioned imagery, though, and so it's necessary to start from the lyrics, the work of Wire and Edwards, especially since, throughout their entire career, the band has followed a songwriting process in which the lyrics come first and the music is built around them. Those on Generation Terrorists are sweeping, vitriolic attacks against everything and everyone, from multinational corporations, in the opening "Slash N Burn" (“Worms in the garden more real than McDonalds/ Drain your blood and let the Exxon spill in […] Madonna drinks Coke and so you do too/ Tastes real good not like a sweet poison should”), to warmongering policies, in "Motorcycle Emptiness" (“Organise your safe tribal war/ Hurt maim kill and enslave the ghetto […] Drive away and it’s the same/ Everywhere death row, everyone’s a victim/ Your joys are counterfeit/ This happiness corrupt political shit”), to the sheer ease with which people let themselves be pacified by those who want them to believe everything's fine, in "Stay Beautiful" (“Find your faith in your security/ All broken up at seventeen/ Jam your brain with broken heroes/ Love your masks and adore your failure”), and the list could go on.

Only a couple of years had passed since the legendary Stone Roses concert at Spike Island, an event many consider the starting point of Britpop, especially in terms of its spirit, namely the desire of young people to usher in a new age of optimism after the depression bred by Thatcherism. Clearly, the thought of attending that concert never even crossed the minds of the four Welshmen.

Plenty of people, before and after the Manics, have tackled these themes in their songs, but Wire and Edwards' lyrics have something unique about them: they push beyond political and social commentary for its own sake, managing to fuse it with an expression of personal distress. The evocative power of the two musicians' words is extraordinary, and what's striking is that the vocabulary they use isn't always particularly sophisticated. A refrain like "Under neon loneliness/ Motorcycle emptiness" is in itself a perfect illustration of this quality, which reaches its peak in the passage from "Stay Beautiful", where Bradfield, after singing "Don't wanna see your face, don't wanna hear your words/ Why don't you just", stops short, and the guitar comes in with two chords echoing the syllables of the phrase "fuck off".

The album nonetheless has its own musical strength, quite apart from that of the lyrics. Starting with the ability of most of the songs to serve as a living embodiment of the idea of "simple but effective", with consistently inspired melodies; Bradfield manages to modulate his voice in a similar yet never identical way from one track to the next; the guitar riffs likewise share a strong internal coherence, without ever making the listener feel like they're hearing the same chords over and over. On top of that, the presence of a minority of differently structured songs is crucial, ones with slower tempos carrying a different, more introverted emotional charge; these tracks, always strategically placed within the tracklist, serve both to provide the necessary stylistic variety and to leave the listener with a mix of feelings that aren't exactly opposites, but aren't quite the same either — let's say they sit side by side with one another.

It's also worth noting that all these ideas are packed into a particularly substantial debut, with eighteen tracks in total: no band today would have the nerve to start out with so many songs, but the Manics clearly already had too much to say right from the start.

Broadening the musical palette

A music-world cliché that has since fallen out of fashion, but was very much in vogue until a few years ago, held that the second album represents a transition between the debut – supposedly showing the band's most spontaneous side – and the so-called "difficult third album", which would instead reveal its, again so-called, maturity. If we want to give it any credit, since every cliché has a grain of truth to it, we could say that Gold Against The Soul, released in 1993, represents the best possible transition. It's a record that is, in fact, far more varied than the debut, and one that breaks away from it quite naturally. The Manics don't sound like a different band: they clearly show where they come from and where they want to go, but they also employ new elements that will remain almost a one-off in their discography.

Each track has a different relationship with the past, present and future: "Life Becoming A Landslide", for instance, starts out as a gentle ballad before swelling in intensity with a guitar riff that's the closest thing on the record to those of the debut; the opening one-two of "Sleepflower"/"From Despair To Where" is a clear development of the debut's prevailing approach, filtered through a more considered, and yes, mature lens; the martial stomp paired with the irresistible pop melody of "La Tristessa Durera" is something that will remain confined to this record for a long time (it will only resurface in 2001 with "So Why So Sad", albeit at a lower quality level), as will the rock mantra of "Roses In The Hospital"; the title track, and especially "Yourself", on the other hand, almost anticipate what will happen on The Holy Bible, with acidic guitar tones and a bass sound pushed right to the edge of overdrive. Bradfield's vocals greatly expand their range of expression, and in several choruses in particular he manages to sound sweet, but always with a hint of venom.

The lyrics heighten the dual nature of political-social protest and personal distress already evident on the debut: starting with the choruses of "Sleepflower", which as mentioned opens the album (“A memory fades to a pale landscape/ You were an extinction, a desert heat/ A blind illness of my anxiety/ I feel like I’m missing pieces of sleep”), and of the title track, placed at the close (“Gold against the soul/ Rock’n’roll has a conscience/ It supplies convenience”), the boundaries of Wire and Edwards's subject matter are clearly defined, and the language used carries a literary force that wasn't always present on the debut, making it the perfect counterpart to the varying structural complexity of the songs across both records.

Gold Against The Soul, unfortunately, isn't the first record that comes to mind when thinking of the Manics, squeezed as it is between the irresistible energy of the debut and the devastating mix of rage and personality of The Holy Bible, but it's a work that undoubtedly deserves reassessment.

Maturity, rage and suffering

It takes the four Welshmen just another year to reach the fateful third album, which will turn out to be their almost unanimously acclaimed masterpiece: The Holy Bible is a weighty, profound record, immediately distinguishable from anything else, in which Richey Edwards's personality takes up far more space than before. The lyrics are, in fact, 70-75% his, as he himself would explain in an interview, and his words' influence is undeniable even on the musical side of things. There can only be a close correlation between the ever more intense rage and the increasingly destructive personal suffering recounted by Edwards, and the band's choice to reinvent themselves in an extremely radical way, leaving room only for guitars, bass and drums, going against the grain of the broadened arrangement palette that defined the previous record; what's most recognisable, above all, is the way the acidic guitars intertwine with a bass played in a highly distinctive manner, both in the structure of its lines – which don't just hold down the drums but function as genuine components of the melodic side too – and in its dark, very robust tone. It's clear, then, that the melodies can't be particularly catchy, but they're closed off just enough to best bring out the sound's ability to make the listener truly feel the emotions recounted in the lyrics.

Also worth mentioning are Bradfield's by-now fully realised vocal maturity and, above all, the band's ability to make every song different from all the others: the fundamental choice described above obviously risked making it difficult to maintain the necessary variety between tracks, yet the songwriting is so inspired that the mission is fully accomplished, not only in the moments where the rage is partly set aside in favour of slightly calmer episodes, but also across the majority of songs defined by the same stylistic choices.

The lyrics, as mentioned, are perfectly in line with the direction taken musically, not least because it's worth remembering that in the band's songwriting process it's the words that inspire the music, not the other way round. The political-social side is dominated by an uncontrollable rage, and when the focus shifts to laying bare personal experience, it opens up scenarios marked by extremely destructive suffering. Two songs can serve as examples of what's been described: "Ifwihteamericatoldthetruthforonedayitsworldwouldfallapart" has a title that speaks for itself, and the lyrics spell out the concept even more forcefully (“Compton – Harlem – a pimp fucked a priest/ The white man has just found a new moral saviour/ Vital stats – how white was their skin/ Unimportant – just another inner-city drive-by thing”), while on the other hand "4st, 7lb" (pronounced "Four Stone, Seven Pound") is harrowing in its lucidly deranged description of the range of mental states experienced by someone battling anorexia (“Problem is diet’s not a big enough word/ I wanna be so skinny that I rot from view/ I want to walk in the snow/ And not leave a footprint/ I want to walk in the snow/ And not soil its purity” [...] "My vision's getting blurred/ But I can see my ribs and I feel fine" [...] “I choose my choice, I starve to frenzy/ Hunger soon passes and sickness soon tires/ Legs bend, stockinged I am Twiggy/ And I don’t mind the horror that surrounds me”).

Not that the other lyrics leave you unmoved: suffice it to say that some of the record's messages have become genuine manifestos for fans to take to heart, first and foremost the one found in the single "Faster": "I know I believe in nothing, but it is my nothing". Overall, alongside the effectiveness with which rage and distress are expressed, what's striking is the insistence on the concept of morality that recurs in almost every single lyric, something that, according to Richey, was evidently and dangerously falling out of use; from a technical standpoint, what stands out is the decidedly more refined language – though this never reduces the lyrics to mere empty stylistic exercises – and the extreme dynamism of the metre, credit for which, however, is also largely due to the way the lyrics themselves were set to music.

The historical value of this record as a whole is absolutely beyond question, above all for the courage shown, once again, in swimming against the current more than ever, especially given how the British scene was evolving in a direction increasingly removed from the one the Manics were pursuing.

Richey's disappearance and the new life as a trio

On the 1st of February 1995, however, Richey Edwards disappeared, never to leave a trace of his existence again. This controversial event would not only change the lives of his three bandmates and friends, but would also prove decisive for the group's artistic path. The three nonetheless decide to carry on with the project without replacing Edwards, and just a year later, in 1996, they release Everything Must Go, their fourth album and the first with the new three-piece line-up. Since the band had already been working on the record before Richey's disappearance, some remnants of his work are present, namely his contribution to the lyrics of five songs and his rhythm guitar on the closing "No Surface All Feeling".

Beyond its emblematic title, the record brings another major shift on the musical front, leaning more towards a certain melodic openness compared to the previous three. As for the overall shape of the record, the Manics aim neither for the homogeneity of the first and third albums nor for the sheer stylistic variety of the second, but instead try out a new approach here too: a central core of six songs inspired by the same basic idea, flanked by two trios of tracks that depart from this idea while still remaining connected to it.

Specifically, the central core mentioned above is made up of songs that can comfortably be described as pop/rock, both for their aforementioned melodic openness and for the extreme freshness, cleanness and fluidity of an essentially guitar-driven sound. The first three tracks, for their part, are more elaborate in terms of sound and carry greater emotional weight, while the last three stick to the simpler sound just described but recapture the emotional charge of the opening section. Britpop is by now dominant across the whole of Britain, and this record can indeed be likened to it musically, both for its reliance on the melody-guitar pairing and for the way "A Design For Life" anticipates the style that will define the movement's final phase, as noted at the outset.

It's the lyrics, though, that keep marking the band out as a phenomenon apart within the UK rock scene. In a landscape dominated by disillusionment, Wire, with or without Edwards, keeps asking anxious questions about political and social issues, a theme that has become prevalent here over personal introspection, probably due to Richey's early departure. The opening words of "A Design For Life" are emblematic: “Libraries gave us power/ Then work came and made us free/ What price now for a shallow piece of dignity”: there's the importance of the awareness that culture can give, there's the historical reference to Nazism, and finally there's the question of how far compromise can undermine the stability of modern society. Equally important are the songs about specific historical figures, like "Kevin Carter", inspired by the story of the South African photographer of the same name who documented the atrocities of apartheid, and "Interiors (Song For Willem de Kooning)", which tells the story of the twentieth-century Dutch painter devoted to abstract expressionism, left orphaned at the age of five and forced to secretly emigrate to the United States in the 1920s.

Another significant lyric is that of "Small Black Flowers That Grow In The Sky", focused on the mistreatment suffered by animals in captivity (“They drag sticks along your walls/ Harvest your ovaries dead mothers crawl/ Here comes warden, Christ, temple, elders/ Environment not yours you see through it all). Testi pieni di insofferenza, insomma, alla quale cerca di porre un freno la conclusiva “No Surface All Feeling”, in which there emerges precisely the desire to set negative feelings aside, albeit with a certain wariness (“Beg me to stop hate my face I know/ They tell me forever just to go/ Just one thing before I get to sleep/ Nothing here but the stains on my teeth/ No not blood just liquid from you/ I only wish it was the truth”).

Everything Must Go is a work that undoubtedly threw the Manics' followers off balance, but it has the great merit of having kept the quality level very high. So, after the initial disorientation, it's unlikely that fans of the quartet - by then forcibly a trio - renounced their passion for the band; on the other hand, the album certainly broadened the group's audience, without bending to crowd-pleasing or commercial logic.

Ups and downs between truth, enemies and lifeblood

The golden period of Manic Street Preachers essentially ends here: the second quartet of albums in their career doesn't come close to the heights of the first, and is therefore much less rich in food for thought.

1998 saw the release of This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours, a title that on the surface brings the band back to the era of their first three albums. That's not the case, though, since almost all the songs are essentially semi-ballads with a full, rounded, soft sound, aside from a couple of exceptions where both the tempo and the lightness increase. The quality of the melodies is still good, but the problem isn't so much the album's homogeneity, since both the debut and The Holy Bible share that trait: what makes this work inferior to all its predecessors is, on one hand, the excessive standardization of the sound, and on the other, the sense that the trio is losing that emotional intensity that had always been associated with its name.

The lyrics too, while picking up on the themes of the previous album with the same decisive stances (especially in the famous line "So if I can shoot rabbits then I can shoot fascists"), are much less striking precisely because of their reduced descriptive and linguistic personality. The album, however, despite its limitations, or perhaps precisely because of them, gets a lot of radio and TV airplay, especially with the single "If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next". Thanks to the aforementioned melodic quality, though, This Is My Truth is a work that overall deserves a solid pass: it merely marks the beginning of a period in which the Manics' inspiration is simply no longer the same.

With Know Your Enemy, from 2001, the band again tries the path of heterogeneity and eclecticism. The 17 songs it contains range from scratchy, faintly dark rock to sunnier pop/rock, from melancholy ballads to out-and-out pop with nods to the dancehall. Here too the only genuinely notable aspect is the quality of the melodies; otherwise the problem is that, while on Gold Against The Soul the variety of ideas was a sign of artistic growth, here it comes across more as a lack of identity, again due to the same two shortcomings already present on the previous album, namely a lack of both personality and emotional intensity. Here too, however, a passing grade can be granted, but it's now clear that the Manics of the past are unlikely to show themselves again.

A year later, in 2002, came the release that sooner or later happens to every band with several years of activity behind it: the singles collection. Forever Delayed also features three unreleased tracks, one of which, "There By The Grace Of God", is decent, and it has the limitation common to almost all albums of this kind, namely offering only a partial snapshot of the band's career, showing only its more easily digestible side, without giving due weight to the group's compositional and especially lyrical courage. If someone read everything written so far knowing only this collection, they would certainly struggle to recognize the band described. Better is the compilation released in 2003, titled Lipstick Traces: A Secret History Of Manic Street Preachers, which gathers numerous b-sides, rarities and covers. In absolute terms the tracks in question are obviously no better than the singles, but this collection at least offers a much more complete picture of all the facets of the Manics' style, and the songs are nonetheless of a more than satisfying average level, even if the band isn't among those whose b-sides include true little gems.

We come to 2004 and the best of the works making up the aforementioned second quartet. Lifeblood actually returns to the stylistic homogeneity of This Is My Truth and above all shows a band fully devoted to pure pop, with no qualifications whatsoever, both in terms of composition, always faithful to the traditional song form, and sound, considerably softened by the reduced use of guitars in favor of keyboards and even synthesizers. What makes the difference, though, compared to the previous two albums, and especially the following one, is the vitality evoked by the title, almost as if the band, having realized it no longer had the venom of its best moments in its DNA, had decided to seek fresh lifeblood for its expressive power from the virtues of quality pop music.

The result is a work that engages the listener from the first second to the last, with thrilling moments like the propulsive "Empty Souls" and the enveloping "I Live To Fall Asleep" and "Solitude Sometimes Is": sure, as with Everything Must Go, less open-minded fans will have turned their noses up, but here quality and emotional intensity are present in abundance; it's true that it's a different kind of quality and intensity compared to the past, but in absolute terms Lifeblood shows us a band that, to return to the title, still has blood in its veins.

This new musical direction also stems from lyrics almost never focused on socio-political issues, but rather on introspective reflections. The exception is "Emily", dedicated to the leader of the women's suffrage movement Emily Pankhurst; otherwise the band looks back at its own beginnings in "1985", at the never-forgotten Richey in "Cardiff Afterlife", and even when it references a controversial historical figure like former US president Richard Nixon, it uses him simply as a means of urging people not to give up in the face of adversity and to judge people as a whole, without limiting themselves to the negative aspects.

The worst years: inspiration seems lost

After this flash of brilliance, though, the Manics once again lose their inspiration, this time in almost dramatic fashion. The solo works of James Dean Bradfield and Nicky Wire, both released in 2006, make the problem fairly evident already: the first (The Great Western) is pop/rock with neither rhyme nor reason, with melodies that are sometimes even interesting but overall lacking in soul; the second (I Killed the Zeitgeist) is a markedly failed attempt to offer a set of songs that are rather closed-off melodically, with an essential, dark sound and an almost new wave-like vital rhythm - all intentions that remain on paper, because in reality the songs are, in fact, totally devoid of inspiration, and it's genuinely hard work to get to the end of the album, or even halfway through it.

Things certainly don't improve in 2007, when the eighth album, titled Send Away The Tigers, came out. A work announced as a return to the dominance of guitars, as if it were a nod to the past, complete with the use of the reversed R character on the cover and booklet, as had happened with the artwork of The Holy Bible. The reality, unfortunately, is quite different: it's rife with blatantly radio-friendly tracks, in the negative sense of the term, with bland melodies, a standardized sound and pointless lyrics. Only the two singles "Your Love Alone Is Not Enough", featuring Nina Persson of the Cardigans, and "Autumnsong" at least manage to be listenable, without of course being exciting in any way, while everything else is fit for the bin and best forgotten as quickly as possible, despite the response, both in terms of sales and media coverage, being very positive.

Send Away The Tigers seemed to have put the final nail in the coffin of any hope of hearing anything good from the Manics ever again, but the announcement that the following album, Journal For Plague Lovers, was written entirely using lyrics that Richey Edwards had left with Nicky Wire a week before disappearing, undoubtedly generated considerable interest around this ninth record. The feeling was that there would be no middle ground in the verdicts: either this operation would spell the end of the band's credibility, or it would mark a major comeback. The album, produced with the involvement of Steve Albini, came out on May 18, 2009, and was immediately greeted with enthusiasm by critics and fans alike: Manic Street Preachers were back at the level they deserved.

An unexpected return to top form, thanks to Richey's legacy

One might have expected a callback to the sound of The Holy Bible, not least because the cover art for Journal For Plague Lovers was entrusted to the same illustrator, but instead it's the entire Richey era as a whole that pervades the record. The first four songs already offer an ideal summary of the album: the opening trio includes tracks that could belong, in order, to the aforementioned The Holy Bible, to Gold Against The Soul, and to Generation Terrorists, while the following track recalls the moments of harsh calm found on the debut.

Throughout the rest of the record, all these references return in turn, but what's striking is that the songs can be compared to those landmark albums not just in approach and style, but in quality too — as if the chance to use Edwards's words again was, for Bradfield and Moore, like the regrowth of Samson's hair. The songwriting is inspired and effective, the sound has that penetrating, gripping power that hadn't been heard in over a decade, and the same goes for Bradfield's vocals, as raw and expressive as in the old days. Steve Albini's contribution as a guru-like presence was certainly important, but more likely the reason behind this new grandeur lies in the fact that the Manics managed to channel, better than ever, the emotional charge that had been fading over the years without their beloved bandmate and friend.

The lyrics that inspired the band's artistic rebirth can be examined in even greater depth than before, because the deluxe edition's booklet reproduces the material Richey left behind in full, not just the words that survived after the adaptations needed to set his literary outpourings to music; the same booklet also shows the drawings that accompanied the lyrics. Even from these, the mental state of a man increasingly at war with the world around him, with its injustices and compromises, and consequently ever more alienated and confused, comes through clearly. Reading the writings, both those that made it into songs and those left out, reinforces the impression of painful disorientation ("Tonight we beg the questioni if a married man fucks a catholic, and his wife dies without knowing, does that make him unfaithful"). Naturally, the lyrics most tied to introspection carry the same tone as always ("Here I am, rise and shine, weighted down, of course I smile", "I would prefer no choice, one bread, one milk, one food that's all, I'm confused, I only want one truth, I really don't mind if I'm being lied too"), and the same can be said of the portion of words cut during the necessary adaptations mentioned above ("Starvation heals internally and conscious can't be cured", "If you buy vanishing cream you need vanishing cream remover at night").

Special mention goes to the chorus of "All Is Vanity", so effective and musically flawless that it makes you want to shout it out loud every time you hear it ("It's not what's wrong, it's what's right, makes me feel like I'm talking a foreign language sometimes, it's not what's wrong, it's what's right, it's a fact of life sunshine, it's a fact of life sunshine"), and the entire lyric of "William's Last Words", which sounds like Richey's definitive farewell ("I'm really tired, I'd love to go to sleep and wake up happy" and, outside the song, "You can die happy but I wonder if you wake up happy"). This last track, sung by Nicky Wire, is a moment of great emotional impact, even though it unfortunately represents the only episode of weak songwriting at the tail end of an album that is otherwise beautiful and important, giving rock fans everywhere a band back in full health.

Still more ups and downs, between postcards, the future and memories

A few months after this album's release, the Manics had already announced the working title of their tenth record, "It's Not War – Just The End Of Love". This would turn out to be just the title of the lead single, while the album itself would be called Postcards From A Young Man. The intrigue surrounding this record lay in finding out whether the trio's need to once again handle everything on their own would mean a further drop in quality, or whether the chance to draw on Richey's contribution again, even for the last time, had sparked something lasting rather than fleeting. Nicky Wire's pre-release comments hardly inspired optimism, as the bassist spoke openly of a record full of radio-friendly songs. Listening to the album, unfortunately, fears of a new decline turned into harsh reality.

Postcards From A Young Man moves through very different territory compared to the previous album, offering a much cleaner, softer sound. The rhythm section, often a strength of the band's finest moments, limits itself to keeping time in the most measured, regular way possible; the guitars always have a glaringly clean, polished tone; strings are a constant presence throughout the record, used somewhat as they were years earlier on "A Design For Life"; James Dean Bradfield's voice also treats cleanliness as doctrine, with no trace whatsoever of its old bite, not least because, in more than one instance, it's backed by massive counter-vocals courtesy of an actual gospel choir. Naturally the songwriting follows the same spirit, sticking very closely to traditional song form, and the lyrics abandon the furious lashing out at the outside world in favor of themes centered on human interiority.

As we've seen, this isn't the first time the Manics have presented themselves in this more conventional, contemplative guise: in previous instances they never managed to grip listeners the way they did on their rawer, more jagged records, but they nearly always satisfied thanks to excellent melodic instincts, which alone kept the listening experience interesting. This record, however, suffers from the same lack of inspiration and vitality already noted on "Send Away The Tigers": the only track that, all things considered, remains pleasant and fresh beyond the richness of the sound is the single "(It's Not War) Just The End Of Love" itself; for the rest, everything is too predictable and obvious, so the record drags on from song to song with real weariness.

Whether one runs into the almost martial pop of the title track, or the stadium-rock wink of "Golden Plattitudes", or the extreme use of strings and counter-vocals mentioned above in "Some Kind Of Nothingness" — which features Ian McCulloch — or more electric, driving moments like the chorus of "Auto Intoxication" and the whole of "A Billion Balconies Facing The Sun", one finds nothing beyond formal polish, and nothing to shake the emotional torpor. "All We Make Is Entertainment" is the title of one of these songs, and unfortunately that phrase can be applied to the Manics as they are now, in the negative sense of the term.

Ever since "Lifeblood", the trio that has represented Manic Street Preachers since 1995 has been unable to find the necessary vitality on its own, succeeding only when it could draw on outside help — namely, the aforementioned legacy left by Edwards. The last two times Nicky Wire, James Dean Bradfield and Sean Moore had to fend for themselves, they failed on both occasions, and while another data point would be needed to be certain, the hopes raised by the previous year's fine showing seem destined to inexorably fade.

On November 8, 2011, a new compilation was released, titled National Treasures, much broader in scope than the earlier "Forever Delayed". It consists of two compact discs with thirty-eight tracks in total, presented in chronological order and left uncut, unlike some tracks included on that other compilation. The selection criterion is a single one: the songs must have been released as singles. National Treasures could certainly have done a better job of representing the band's history, but it carries out the task fairly thoroughly. On the first disc, which contains tracks from the first four albums, "Generation Terrorists" is represented quite faithfully, as is "Everything Must Go", while some aspects of "Gold Against The Soul" and "The Holy Bible" are missing from the selections made for this compilation. Still, one cannot overlook the intrinsic beauty of the songs and the effect produced by listening to so many tracks of such quality back to back. In this respect, the first of the two discs is superb: there isn't a single song that's less than wonderful, and it's impossible to decide which might be better than the others. An almost unique leveling-up that makes these nineteen tracks together a true balm for the soul. The second disc, of course, can't compete on that front, but it does a better job of representing the eras it covers. All the albums from which songs here were drawn are, in fact, well summarized — the only shame is the absence of "Journal For Plague Lovers", since no single had been released from it. Various rumors are currently circulating about the band's future, between those who believe the statements that there will be a three-year break before a return, and those convinced that such statements actually mask a wish to split up. Either way, there are plenty of treasures among the Manics' songs, and this compilation is a good way to discover most of them.

Only two years would pass, however, before a new album, released in September 2013 and titled Rewind The Film. Its release, moreover, came with the announcement that another album was already finished and would be released just a few months later. "Futurology", the title of this other record, was initially slated for a June 2014 release, before actually arriving in stores on July 7, and the band performed a couple of its tracks live during their UK tour in March/April 2014. Back to Rewind The Film: there are three songs featuring as many guest singers dueting with Bradfield: on the title track there's Richard Hawley, on the opening "This Sullen Welsh Heart" there's Lucy Rose, while on "4 Lonely Roads" Cate Le Bon also sings. The very desire to draw on all these different voices already shows the Welsh trio's intent to explore far more thoroughly the possible choices in terms of vocal and sonic harmonies and arrangements, in order to give more body and color to the skeleton of their compositions — made up of a main melody, vocal timbre and lyrics. The record's greatest strength, or at least that of part of it, lies precisely in offering the listener great sonic variety while avoiding both the risk of that variety being an end in itself and that of disconnection between the different songs. Even the boldest transition — between the immediate, joyous, epic, orchestral pop of "Show Me The Wonder" and the cerebral, dark, less immediate introspection of the following title track — is perfectly engineered, and the band finally manages to hold onto its desire for simple, catchy songwriting without the tracks sounding flat or banal, precisely thanks to this sonic exploration. This holds especially true for the first half of the record, from the dreamy "This Sullen Welsh Heart" to the electroacoustic "(I Miss The) Tokyo Skyline", passing through the aforementioned transition, the anxious sonic and rhythmic mid-tempo drive of "Builder Of Routines", and the calm of "4 Lonely Roads". The second half, however, doesn't hold the same quality level: "Anthem For A Lost Cause" has a catchy melody, but the banality of the Manics' weaker moments creeps back into the sound, while the following five songs show a visible drop in melodic inspiration, and even the sonic architecture sounds subdued and lacking in emotional intensity.

Rewind The Film is therefore the classic album that earns a passing grade only thanks to the mathematical average between the verdict on its first half and that on its second, but what the Manics managed to achieve in that first half matters, because it shows the trio is still capable of excellent work even without drawing on Richey Edwards's final legacy, and without giving up the clean, rounded sound they've stuck with for years whenever left to their own devices. All this while awaiting "Futurology", described as more guitar-driven but also with a few slight kraut-rock influences.

Futurology, compared to its immediate predecessor, was announced as more angular and influenced by krautrock, by the band's 2011 European tour and by early-20th-century avant-garde art. In reality, those declared influences lie more in the type of feelings expressed and in the record's aesthetic than in any actual stylistic template. There's nothing here directly traceable back to the stated sources of inspiration, yet there is a square, cold sound that nonetheless lets tension and unease show through its theoretical formal composure. This is terrain the Manics had never ventured into before, and in order to engage with this sonic approach and the emotional range beneath it, the Welsh trio chooses not to abandon the melodic clarity that has marked almost all of its records over the last decade; yet you still can't really call this pure pop songwriting, in the sense that none of these melodies are built to lodge in your head on first listen - instead they hold a subtle balance between accessibility and elusiveness, and it's thanks to that balance that the blend with the other elements mentioned above works so well.

The lyrics, always an important element in the Manics' work, also share some traits with the overall framework just described. The language is decidedly erudite and high-register, and the various scenarios depicted are bleak and dense with negativity, never immediately revealing all the meanings they carry. Take the lyrics of the single "Walk Me To The Bridge": from Nicky Wire's own statements we know it's about a bridge linking Sweden and Denmark, that while crossing it Wire himself was contemplating leaving the band, and that the song is built around the idea of the bridge as the possibility of an experience outside one's own context, since you set off from one place and arrive in another. Simply reading or listening to the lyrics, none of this is remotely clear. The same goes for almost every song on the record, which always give the impression of carrying hidden meanings known only to whoever wrote them - aside from a few cases where the references are easier to grasp ("Europa Geht Durch Mich", for instance).

One thing this record shares with its predecessor is the great variety in both the compositional and sonic structure of the individual tracks. Here too there are several guests helping out the band, both playing and singing. The search for something new without losing their own identity, the variety, and the fact that most of the songs come off well are strengths that can certainly be credited to Futurology. What's missing, though, is whatever it would take to place it among the Manics' very best work. It's not easy to explain in writing why, for all the strengths highlighted above, it's hard to get past a kind of contented satisfaction without tipping over into genuine enthusiasm, but in practical terms, the quality and immediacy of these songs are enough to give the listener pleasure, but not enough to truly move them. It's left to the listener to decide whether to let the satisfaction over this record's undeniable positive qualities prevail, or the regret at coming so close to being moved without quite managing it.

Resistance is futile, but the inspiration is good

After a full 4 years away from the record market, the Manics return in the spring of 2018 with Resistance Is Futile. The band goes back to exploring its more radio-friendly side, with songs that are spotless in melody, vocals and sound, marked by extensive use of orchestral elements and spacious, often grandiose arrangements. The record is a perfect example of how you can chase popular appeal without sacrificing quality. The melodies are flawless, and most of them reveal their full strength not so much on first listen, but more and more with every subsequent spin. James Dean Bradfield's voice is enveloping and charged with emotion, even though it forgoes the cutting edge that defined many of his most compelling performances; on the records mentioned above, the frontman sings in much the same way, but almost always gives the impression of doing so somewhat half-heartedly, and you have to go back to "Lifeblood" (2004) to find a set of songs where the vocals are as clean as they are emotionally genuine. The same can be said of the sound, which is very polished, dynamic and, as mentioned, often bolstered by orchestral elements, ambitious throughout the record, with just the right colours, interplay and harmonies to come across as sincere and adrenaline-charged.

The two best songs, the ones that grab you melodically on first listen and whose impact certainly doesn't fade with time, are "Dylan & Caitlin", a gorgeous duet with a The Anchoress on great form, narrating the complicated relationship between the poet Dylan Thomas and his wife Caitlin, with the story enhanced by a continuous, devastating interplay of strings and acoustic and electric guitars, and "Hold Me Like A Heaven", which expresses the need to cling to one's loved ones in moments of particular uncertainty, through a languid, rounded sound that is the perfect realisation of an emotional state halfway between disorientation and the will not to give up. That said, there isn't a single weak song on the record, ranging from the martial grandeur of opener "People Give In", to the perfect alternation of guitar and keyboard riffs in "International Blue", to the drier sound of "Liverpool Revisited", which, twenty years on from "S.Y.M.M.", returns to the tragedy that occurred at Sheffield's stadium in 1989, when 96 fans lost their lives due to the reckless handling of crowd flow by the police, to the guitars of "Broken Algorithms", for once more aggressive, which blend into the album's dominant overall sound without ever feeling out of place - if anything, adding a further point of interest.

As always, the lyrics matter a great deal to the Manics, and from the examples just given it's clear that good work has gone into this aspect too. Resistance Is Futile doesn't quite cross the threshold into the band's Olympus, but it is simply the best record among all those in which Richey Edwards didn't write a single word. That's no small thing.

In something of a stylistic continuity, The Ultra Vivid Lament, released in the late summer of 2021, clearly reveals the Manics' love for '70s pop, adding to it that veil of sadness that marks unforgettable stories reaching their end.

The lyrics on offer are among the most autobiographical Nicky Wire has ever written, steeped in a strong sense of melancholic resignation to the passing of time. And yet, within the insecurity that colours much of the writing, there hides a wistful beauty, as the opener "Still Snowing In Sapporo" attests, from which emerges that majestic widescreen unease the Manics are damned masters of: galloping acoustic progressions à la Johnny Marr and a gathering of rich chords surround the mournful existential observations delivered by Bradfield's voice, as clean and cutting as ever.

For longtime fans, the chord progressions in clear ABBA style that wrap around the single "The Secret He Had Missed" might come across as overly saccharine, while the refined piano ballad "Quest For Ancient Color" winks at the catalogues of Elton John and Billy Joel.

Mark Lanegan is the ideal guest for the charismatic "Blank Diary Entry", while glimpses of the old Manics break through on "Happy Bored Alone", an ode to the restorative power of solitude, where bright notes decorate a hypnotic soundscape before Bradfield lifts it back up for the final refrain.

It's admirable that Manic Street Preachers keep finding lasting inspiration, roughly three decades on from talk of splitting up. Few bands inspire so much devotion, passion and heated debate among their fans, and The Ultra Vivid Lament will certainly serve as fresh fuel for plenty more of it.

The following Critical Thinking (2025), released four years later, also shows that the band manages to adapt and grow over the years while still holding on to a strong identity. The band plays with the contrast between opposing elements, pairing bright passages with shadowy lyrics, tackling the theme of social decline with its usual intelligence and depth, and finally addressing ageing with dignity and wisdom, without giving in to cumbersome nostalgia or to a cynicism that would ultimately be superficial. It opens with the title track, rough and direct in sound, with scratchy guitar and deep bass, followed by the upbeat "Decline & Fall", a brisk three-plus minutes, much like "Brushstrokes Of Reunion". There is, however, one big novelty: on "Hiding In Plain Sight" bassist and lyricist Nicky Wire, joined for the occasion by Lana McDonagh, takes on lead vocals for the first time, singing a rock'n'roll melody typical of the '70s. Worth noting too is the guitar intro of "People Ruin Paintings", with its own touch of melancholy, carried along as it is by a thoroughly captivating solo towards the end. The following "Dear Stephen" is built instead on an acoustic rhythm and is embellished with electric arpeggios and a thoroughly catchy chorus that goes straight to the heart.

The strength of this Manics project lies precisely in its airy melodies, bearers of joy, yet at the same time capable of evoking the glories of a certain brand of British rock from the '80s, first and foremost The Smiths, but also Pretenders. The same mood carries through the following three songs up to "OneManMilitia", which gives fresh momentum for the grand finale with its power chords harking back to the Welsh group's punk origins.

Contributions by Cristiano Orlando ("The Ultra Vivid Lament") and Stefano Tacinelli ("Critical Thinking")

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

Share on