Album review: Manic Street Preachers

Published on Friday 17 September 2010 14:04

Manic Street Preachers: Postcards From A Young Man *** Columbia, £12.99

UNLESS you happen to be Nick Cave, the use of a gospel choir in pop music tends to be a crutch, signalling an X Factor short cut to faux-transcendence.

Twenty years and ten albums into their career, Manic Street Preachers have reckoned that it is time to bring out the gospel choir for an album they have deemed "one last shot at mass communication". But the Manics are better than that. In the absence of any angry young pop stars willing to take on their politically engaged mantle, the Welsh trio are still out there agitating and educating. "We may be 40 but the furies remain," they say. Only this week, as part of a typically eloquent, wide-ranging diatribe for the NME, bassist and lyricist Nicky Wire called Nick Clegg out as "a third- rate motivational speaker" (and a ruder word beginning with "c").

Postcards From A Young Man is filled with lyrics which resonate the same distrust, disgust and disappointment. It's just that these sentiments come smothered indiscriminately in string arrangements, the aforementioned gospel choir and even, at one point, a mandolin (which may or may not kill fascists).

Their recording history has shown that there are two sides to the Manics - the outsider scab-picking nihilists and the uplifting, anthemic populists. Just as they followed their darkest, yet most brilliant moment, The Holy Bible - coloured even blacker by the subsequent disappearance of their inspired lyricist Richey Edwards - with Everything Must Go, their most audacious overture to the mainstream, so they have followed last year's visceral, punky, darkly humorous Journal For Plague Lovers, featuring a blistering selection of the lyrics Edwards had bequeathed to his fellow band members before leaving, with this maximalist commercial gambit. But Postcards From A Young Man is no Everything Must Go.

It's not the brazen pitch for the Radio 2 playlist that is the problem, it is the relative blandness of the MOR songwriting and the over-egged arrangements that underwhelm. Current single (It's Not War) - Just the End of Love may feature commendably melodic rock guitar, melodic strings, a melodic chorus and a melodic guitar solo but all that melody strung together still can't make a memorable song.

The title track is their latest failed attempt to write another Design For Life (though you can't blame them for trying). Its power ballad beefiness plays against the melancholic lyrics, all the more so when things go (deliberately) a bit Queen at the end.

The hollow lighter-waving continues on the unfortunately titled Some Kind Of Nothingness, which throws everything at the wall but drums up a big, empty fanfare for no great cause.Echo & the Bunnymen frontman Ian McCulloch provides an indifferent guest vocal, which the band seem very excited about for their own nostalgic reasons.

There is a welcome break from all the incontinent gush of orchestration on Auto-Intoxication, a song which manages to reconcile the Manics' love of a good old rock'n'roll chug with their more esoteric influences and some ideological heft. The title, referring to the medical condition where the body poisons itself, is very Richey. Fellow Welshman John Cale guests on piano, which kind of figures.

Having made his inauspicious vocal debut on Journal, Wire has another somewhat improved stab at a lead vocal on The Future Has Been Here 4 Ever in charming, dog-eared contrast to frontman James Dean Bradfield's lusty lungs. The track is also blessed with the return of drummer Sean Moore's trumpet playing, last heard on the sublime Kevin Carter.

There are still a couple of eloquent state-of-the-nation wake-up calls in their armoury. All We Make Is Entertainment is a typically bilious, sloganeering Manics title, and there are lyrics to match: "pointless jobs just lead to pointless lives". The song is a power rock requiem for the UK's manufacturing industries, detonated by the sale of Cadbury's to Kraft and the supreme irony that banks are now nationalised institutions.

Ironically, one of the laziest MOR numbers on the album, Golden Platitudes, is also one of the most lyrically savage tracks, lamenting the slow, painful suicide of the Labour party with the words "oh what a Shangri-La/oh what a show we are".

Wire also makes articulate sideswipes at the Internet, specifically as a hotbed for casual, anonymous hatemongering, on Don't Be Evil and A Billion Balconies Facing The Sun - a title lifted from JG Ballard's Cocaine Nights. (Bassist Duff McKagan of early Manics heroes Guns N' Roses guests on the latter, like it really matters to anyone but the band.)

Conversely, the likeably lightweight Hazelton Avenue celebrates the simple joy of being comfy and insulated in your own nest. With so much to say for themselves and such a fluent way of saying it, the Manics are still a blessing in our midst but is it too much to hope that they might try doing something about that musical middle-aged spread?