The Manic Street Preachers were, much like The Jam before them, a band tagged early on as 'political.' In neither case did the label fit well: The Manics' politics opposed not so much specific political agendas as politics itself. Also like The Jam, they fused punk with other genres: for The Jam, it was punk + jazz; for The Manics, punk + metal. "Motown Junk" is a fairly standard punk song structure, punctuated by heavy guitar solos. Oh yes, and:
Motown junk a lifetime of slavery
Songs of love echo underclass betrayals
Stops your heart beating for 1-6-8 seconds
Stops your brain thinking for 1-6-8 seconds
Their early work, though inspired, was uneven. Generation Terrorists had three memorable songs; Gold Against the Soul was more good than bad. By the time of The Holy Bible, the Manics perfected a bracing, vitriolic sound to match, well, depressing subject matter: Communist oppression, crime waves, racial indifference, the Holocaust, and, in one memorable song ("4st. 7lbs."), Richey James' bulimia. The album caps off with "P.C.P.", which catalogues endless frustrations ("lawyers before love," "beware Shakespeare," "pro-life equals anti-choice") with P.C. language, the best of which is: "P.C./she speaks impotent and sterile/naive, blind, atheist, sadist/ stiff upper lip first principle of her silence."
It took me a long time to figure out "La Tristesse Durera", which did not entirely click for me until I took a class on British history 1901-1945. The song is written from the perspective of a World War I veteran, angry at the indifference with which his suffering has been and is met ("I see Liberals/ I am just a fashion accessory," "I sold a medal/ It paid a bill/ It sells on market stalls/ parades Milan catwalks"). The anger, everywhere in their music, finally meets a subject worthy of that anger.
The real turn is with Everything Must Go, which I have blogged about several times before, and is one of my favorite albums of all time. This is the Rolling Stone review that made me go out and buy the album:
A triumph of dignity and style over potentially crippling adversity, Everything Must Go is the most underrated album of the year – in this country, anyway, where the Manics have been running into a brick wall of indifference since 1992's Generation Terrorists. The band's songwriting and stacked-vocal-and-guitar splendor have grown by leaps and bounds from shotgun-pop pugnacity into something a lot more interesting – Abbey Road with tenement-block attitude; Give 'Em Enough Rope as produced by Phil Spector. But in February 1995, the Manics were blindsided by the disappearance of guitarist and lyricist Richey James, a case still unsolved by the British police. On Everything Must Go, singer and guitarist James Dean Bradfield, bassist Nicky Wire and drummer Sean Moore confront their nightmare head-on – the baffling loss, the frustrating lack of answers – and battle their way to daylight. A gnawing sense of dark stasis hovers over the record: The rainbow glow of the orchestral score in "A Design for Life" is tinged with irritable despair in Bradfield's soaring, caustic voice. Yet for all of the images of crisis and escape in these songs, Everything Must Go is a record of painstaking melodic craft and thundering execution, a proclamation of physical and emotional cleansing – up to a point. In the CD booklet, the Manics have included a quote from the artist Jackson Pollock: "The pictures I contemplate painting would constitute a halfway state and an attempt to point out the direction of the future – without arriving there completely." In other words, they're still waiting for James.
There's nothing I can really add to that. "Australia:"
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