Ultra Vivid Lament (2021)

Ultra Vivid Lament, the Manics’ fourteenth long player, was released at the end of the summer of 2021. The album was composed and recorded during the COVID pandemic and the band talked a lot in interviews about how much it had been informed by their experiences of the lockdown. (Aside from anything else it had given James Dean Bradfield the opportunity to go back and re-learn the piano, something which had a significant impact on how the band wrote the music for the record). It is unsurprising then that Ultra Vivid Lament turns out to be so obsessed with (coming to terms with) ageing and mortality, or that it sounds as elegiac as it does. In fact not only was the period of the album’s gestation marked by one of the most disruptive pandemics of the last hundred years or so but also by the loss of both of lyricist Nicky Wire’s parents. 

Low on obvious hooks, and with the choruses peaking somewhere just below the threshold of memorability, Ultra Vivid Lament is not an immediate album by any stretch of the imagination. Given enough listens however it turns out to be a reasonably affecting one, with the arrangements, instrumentation and vocals doing a lot of the heavy musical lifting in compensation for the unobtrusive melodies. The overall effect is poignant in the warm, unassuming manner of bands like Shack or Elbow and it all feels somehow appropriately middle aged. The album is heavily suffused with the glow of nostalgia right from its very first track, ‘Still Snowing in Sapporo’, the title and lyrics referencing the band’s 1993 tour of Japan (the year is mentioned in the very first line of the song). The song, which sets the wintry/autumnal tone for everything that is to follow, constitutes a clear highlight on a record which generally makes single track highlights difficult to pick out: precisely because of how homogeneous and of a piece it all is (having said that however, I would also like to single out ‘Diapause’, with its affecting lament of “I built so many walls”, as well the late and sorely missed Mark Lanegan’s star vocal turn on ‘Blank Diary Entry’). 

Resistance is Futile (2018)

The name of the album is Resistance is Futile and the cover features an antique, colourised photo of a samurai in heroic pose and glancing away from the camera: neck muscles strained and taut, a certain insouciance in the set of the lips. With the music on the record falling as flat as it ultimately does however there’s little motivation to look any further into the significance of either the title or the artwork.

Futurology (2014)

The future just isn’t what it used to be

INTRODUCTION

So now we come to Futurology, an album whose very existence was enough to demote Rewind‘s review score by one point, solely, that is, on the basis of of how underwhelming the latter sounded in comparison. As an added bonus, listening to Futurology over again did an exceptional job of reminding me why I was such a massive fan of the Manics in the first place, in spite, namely, of all the disappointments that has entailed over the years (in spite of weeks listening to both Rewind and Postcards repeatedly in order to be able to write and balanced fair reviews of both of them). Above all the album is testament to the rather remarkable fact that here was a band that was still capable, almost three decades into their career (a career, lest we forget, at the self-mythologising dawn of which, the group had gone out of their way to assure everyone of their volatility and evanescence) of writing songs that were easily up there with their very best: songs that were just as convincing or just as rousing as much earlier classics such as ‘Motorcycle Emptiness’, ‘From Desire to Where’, or ‘Revol’. Futurology proved that the Manics had never lost the capacity to to renew themselves, to redeem themselves, after numerous iterations of insipid soft rock washout, that the brilliance of Journal for Plague Lovers hadn’t been some belated, Richey inspired fluke. In other words it showed that in spite of reaching the kind of age that would have previously provoked scorn and derision in indie music circles, the band were still very much a going concern.

Rewind the Film (2013)

Often, one of the great pleasures of reviewing a band or an artist’s entire discography derives from the satisfaction of being able to fit each release into an overall narrative curve, something that frequently has the side effect of making said band or artists ‘minor’ records take on a new and retrospective interest or importance. To be honest most musicians don’t really merit the attention or effort that such an endeavour very often calls for. The Manic Street Preachers, on the other hand, are one of those groups that absolutely do.  It’s difficult to think of another band whose career alternated between quite such extremes: that is, from being responsible for what was, lyrically and thematically (though not sonically) speaking, one of the most extreme records ever put out by a major label, to going on, just a few years afterwards, to become a byword for safe, 70’s tinged stadium rock (because not for nothing did they end up being so readily welcomed into the Britpop fold), to swinging part of the way back again a decade kater. 

Postcards from a Young Man (2010)

If Send Away the Tigers and Journal for Plague Lovers witnessed the Manics undergo an electrifying mid-to-late-career resurgence by way of a belated re-engagement with many of their earliest influences then Postcards from a Young Man had the group largely return to the soft-boiled, ‘radio-friendly’ maturity of their middle period. The furious, lyrically outlandish post-punk of Journal for Plague Lovers was swapped (once again) for sensibly anthemic AOR with the intensity being consequently dialed all the way down and everything reduced to a rather more predictable, rather more anodyne, series of emotional peaks and troughs. It’s unsurprising then the ambitions which the group avowed for the album were explicitly commercial. They even promised us that there would be “big radio hits” this time round, with Nicky Wire talking up the record at one point as “heavy metal Tamla Motown […] Van Halen playing The Supremes”.

Journal for Plague Lovers (2009)

With Journal of Plague Lovers the Manic Street Preachers had once again (and after the space of over a decade) released a record whose obscure nature and ever-so-cryptic allure called for a much deeper engagement with the band’s history and the particular circumstances of its creation on the part of the listener — much deeper at least than was usual for bands of that genre and milieu. There has always been a certain self-referentiality and maybe even an evasiveness to the Manics, something which in the group’s earlier years had driven listeners to scour obsessively over interviews, liner notes, fanzines, etc in the hopes of understanding the roots of the band’s unusual emotional intensity — of unravelling that anomalous mesh of cultural and aesthetic obsessions which did so much to set them apart from their peers. This abstruseness was both a product of, and a means of entrenching, the outsider status which the Manics did so much to cultivate and play up to at the beginning of their careers: right up to and including the time of the release of the Holy Bible. But although they never entirely abandoned that last gang in town mentality during the subsequent, more conventional (read markedly less interesting) phase of their career — their soggy middle — there was nothing about the band’s music, post-Everything, that would have necessarily inspired a new listener to undertake their own obsessive quest to learn more about the people who made it; until, potentially, we come to Journal for Plague Lovers.

This shouldn’t be surprising, however, given the album’s provenance, given, that is, that the record was consciously intended as a (cathartic) reckoning with the band’s past, which of course inevitably means, the artistic and otherwise legacy of one Richard James “Richey” Edwards. In fact Journal for Plague Lovers had its origins in a binder full of unused lyrics, prose writings and visual collages which Edwards had presented to the other members of the band a month or so before his disappearance. This binder was eventually put away in a drawer from which, as the story goes, it would only very occasionally see the light of day. Nevertheless the sheer existence of those dormant lyrics and the implicit challenge which they posed (both personal and artistic) would ultimately prove decisive as the band set about contemplating the follow up LP to Send Away the Tigers. Indeed, rather than capitalising on the success of the latter and releasing the kind of generic sequel which the group’s record label had been eager for them to make, the band determined that the time was finally right to revisit Edwards’s unused source material, to break out that dusty and sequestered old binder. Soundwise, moreover, the band’s decision to turn the album’s production duties over to Steve Albini was to mark a, very welcome, move away from those polished ‘middle of the road’ production values which they had so perniciously made their own from Everything Must Go onwards. So that while Send Away the Tigers had seen the Manics invoke some of their earliest, most seminal musical influences — post a lengthy interval in which they had oh so scrupulously denied themselves the pleasure — Journal saw them instead returning to their own earlier artistic successes and almost completely fulfilling the harder, rockier, hard-rockier promise of much of their pre-Everything material.

Send Away the Tigers (2007)

Released in 2007 — three years after the dullish though not unpromising Lifeblood — the Manics Street Preachers’ eighth album, Send Away the Tigers, was immediately hailed as a long overdue return to form for the band. Up till this point it felt like the band had been putting out consistently underwhelming material for years and years. And although This is My Truth and Lifeblood had had their moments, it would be fair to say that the band’s records had indeed been somewhat unfocused and asinine ever since the late 90s.  But finally, the critics agreed with something approaching unanimity, the group had found its way again. And happily, this wasn’t just the usual music press hyperbole, Send Away the Tigers would in fact turn out to be the beginning of a streak of good to great to fantastic albums that the band have managed to continue up till this very day. 

Lifeblood (2004)

The expectations were admittedly quite low on this one — and after Know Your Enemy how could they be anything but? — but Lifeblood starts off by defying those expectations, its opening track ‘1986’ once again making a compelling case (after the creeping mediocrity of the last couple of records) for the Manics’ change in musical direction, away from the rockier, much more guitar-centric sound of their first three albums. Harried, energetic, and serious, it is the kind of glossy, vaguely Numan-esque confection that the band would make completely their own a few years later — and while the song’s urgency and commanding instrumental momentum can’t entirely compensate for the dearth of a worthwhile hook, it does nevertheless succeed as a promise of better to come. Better to come, but not for a while, because it’s mostly (though not all) downhill from hereon in.

Know Your Enemy (2001)

Released in that short period of turn-of-the-millennial calm preceding what are routinely described as ‘the events of 9/11’, Know Your Enemy looks, Janus-wise, both backwards to the past, to the eclectic genre-bewilderment and overall discombobulation which characterised indie rock in the immediate post-Britpop era — with no one ever really sure what direction the music was actually heading in — as well as forwards to the future, to the musical tedium and thoroughgoing wotlessness that would afflict alternative music in the decade to come.

This is My Truth Tell Me Yours (1998)

So I basically stopped following the MSP’s career after Everything Must Go. This was due in part to an ever increasing appreciation for the Holy Bible coupled with the feeling that the Manics had become a different and much lesser band after that album — something far too akin to a middle of the road soft rock trio for my (then) liking. Mostly though, it was due to a natural evolution in musical interests. My musical horizons, limited to British indie/alternative and West-Coast rap (G-funk) in my mid-teens, had begun to broaden out and take in a frenzy of new genres and artists as a result. In particular, I developed an interest in instrumental electronic music — drum n’ bass, trip hop, and techno — something which eventually led me off onto a experimental/noise/free-improv tangent with the Wire replacing the NME as my music periodical of choice. This would, however, turn out to be something of a cul-de-sac and my musical itinerary eventually took a u-turn and led me back towards much more conventional fare and an unprecedented (for me) interest in classic rock. (I can trace back this latter interest to my sighting on Glasgow University campus of the apparition of a furrow-browed but exceptionally dapper young bohemian sporting a long, grey, woollen overcoat with a badge of the cover of Blonde on Blonde on his lapel, and being so impressed by this vision that I told myself afterwards that whatever else happened I just had to hear that fucking record; everything else followed on from that.) In fact I didn’t really get back into the Manics again as an ongoing musical project (not experimental or classic enough) until about a decade later. (I can pinpoint my reawakened interest in the band to the first time I heard ‘Your Love is Not Enough’ piping out over the speakers in Woolworths in the Victoria Centre in Nottingham in 2007 — JDB dueting with Nina Persson and the pair getting on famously well together — on the basis of which encounter I would eventually go on to buy Send Away the Tigers.)