It’s pretty bold of a band to announce a new album with “we’re going for big radio hits on this one”. It’s also hard to think of one that could escape a backlash against this type of honesty, but in this case the band in question is the Manic Street Preachers and their career is basically built around the combination of honestly and shoot-your-mouth-off boldness. It’s a credit to the band that they escape — and indeed, transcend — any accusation of ‘selling out’, but it’s also unsurprising given a look at their 18 year back-catalogue, which is partly based around the type of grainy, acetic and often aggressive tunes that were never designed for radio. The band acknowledged this head-on with 2009′s Journal For Plague Lovers — the second best epitome of this after The Holy Bible — from which they didn’t even release any singles.
In the same vein, bassist and lyricist Nicky Wire described the album as “one last shot at mass communication”. More than a media-friendly soundbite, this was actually a promising hint to the fans that the band are doing what they do best — living on the edge. The Manics have never been a band that exuded longevity: they famously claimed that their debut album, Generation Terrorists, would be their last, came close to breaking up after the disappearance of Richey Edwards and seemed close to the end after the failure of Know Your Enemy and the 3-year break and cash-in-on-past-success Greatest Hits packages that ensued. The key point is that neither do they suit it; their worst material comes from periods when the band was stable and comfortable; Wire’s statement seems to reassure fans that the band have regained their immediacy.
It’s not hard to see why. Journal For Plague Lovers could have represented the band reaching the end of its natural life; it featured lyrics entirely written by Edwards ‘back in the day’ and was the spiritual successor to The Holy Bible, thus carrying a real sense of a band come full circle. Instead of interpreting it this way, however, it seems the band have looked at their current place as free of that circle — refreshed, rejuvenated and perhaps down an albatross or two. This sets them up nicely to move on to do what they do best — finely-crafted arena-primed pop-rock.
And boy, have they succeeded. Not since Everything Must Go have we seen such sweeping choruses, exuberant strings and richly layered melodies. Simply put, it combines the mass appeal of that album, This Is My Truth and Send Away The Tigers and somehow manages to further it, albeit in a direction even further away from the more caustic roots that truly define the band to most fans. That said, the layers upon layers of strings, choirs and vocals help achieve the rich sounds and melodies that do define this album, and they have just about remained on the right side of creating too dense a mix — although with some tracks like ‘Some Kind of Nothingness’, it might take a few listens to realise that this is the case. James Dean Bradfield’s trademark majestic yet aggressive vocals preside over all this, adding definition to the musical chaos, and sound every bit as good as they did back in 1996.
Wire’s primary topic for discussion this time round is the social-political-economic state of our nation, including the decline of the manufacturing sector (‘All We Make Is Entertainment’), New Labour (‘Golden Platitudes’) and the online revolution (‘A Billion Balconies Facing The Sun’ and ‘Don’t Be Evil’). However, what separates it from being an ‘A Design For Life’ for the noughties is that social and political commentary is more of a means to an end this time round; the key focus is, as the title suggests, the rupture of growing up and growing old. Don’t look for innovation in these lyrical topics, but instead, look towards the revelation that Wire’s lyricism is seeming more natural than ever, and for once, never ceases to truly complement the music, without losing its sophistication. The familar esoteric, confused or downright undecipherable metaphors are still there of course, but the fans wouldn’t have it any other way. Richey certainly wouldn’t have, either.
The album is inarguably indulgent — a big bombastic, lumbering thing — but at the same time, it is clearly the one the band have been itching to make for a while; Wire’s excitement in early interviews was palpable: “it’s going to be an amazing album!” And, because anyone would say they deserved to cut loose and make an album like this, it manages to be an overtly radio-friendly collection of songs that won’t be fly-paper for pretentious mockery. If you want to know what the Manic Street Preachers’ defining characteristic is, it could just be the fact that they can achieve that small miracle.