There Is (Still) An Eloquence In Screaming : Postcards From A Young Man by Manic Street Preachers

I’m not saying it was all Oasis’ fault (although their massive mainstream acceptance probably didn’t help) but one of the many dubious legacies of the Britpop/dadrock era was the liberal dousing of many a basic guitar tune with unecessarily copious amounts of strings. Strings indicated bigness, apparent sophistication behind the knuckle-dragging and the lager, and were probably in many instances coke-driven rather than artistically necessary. Strings – or rather the misuse of them – became particularly culpable for the recidivist homogenisation of the British music of that era.

There were notable exceptions – Suede’s Dog Man Star for example was able to utilise that band’s innate sense of drama to articulate a true sense of being cinematic, widescreen, which takes the music into a place much bigger than merely ‘sounding big’, and the same could be said for Blur’s The Universal, and elements of Pulp’s This Is Hardcore ; however probably the best example of a truly powerful and elegiac use of strings from this period is Everything Must Go, by Manic Street Preachers. The Spector-esque production of that record imbued it with a stately elegance which acted as a moral bulwark against the pressures of the band’s own situation prior to and during its making. Not that this period was the first time rock/indie bands had made use of the orchestra, you can trace it back through the likes of REM, The Smiths and back to one particular touchstone album for the Manics, Ocean Rain by Echo & The Bunnymen, one of James Dean Bradfield’s early key records in particular.

Whilst there have been missteps in their career – perhaps at their ‘biggest’ with This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours (I recall a JDB quote on a BBC doc about it being their ‘towering artistic achievement’ which made me cringe a bit….sounding like just another band saying their current record is their best album ; it was their most varied record up to then but if you’re so aware of it, it makes that variety sound contrived) - the Manics do cinematic as well as anyone. Their music has always, through times fertile and fallow, strived to express the tension within the melancholic (Wire: “At our best, rage and melancholia becomes uplifting. ‘Your Love Alone Is Not Enough’ is a line from a suicide note. But we turn it into a world wide hit. Only we can do that.”), that tipping point if on which you can balance yourself you can always find hope within fear, and beauty within the ugliest of truths, and on this record the enveloping, uplifting string arrangements, elegant, spine-tingling melodies and powerful, momentous riffs express this more and more acutely with each listen.

Opener It’s Not War (Just The End OF Love) sets the tone, with flowing strings underscored by powerful guitars, and within this you can find the central question of the whole record - “To feel some tenderness / do you have to give up?” - to which the rest of album delivers a resolute NO!

This is no more clearly put than in the title track, which brings on more big riffage, more orchestration, and confirms the manifesto:

“I don’t believe the absolutes anymore

I’m quite prepared to admit I was wrong

This life it sucks your principles away

You have to fight against it every single day

These are the postcards from a young man

They may never be written or posted again”.

This is an elegy to youth and the passage of time, to keeping the vibrancy and passion alive even if you can't stop the ticking of the clock, and how

“This world will not impose its will I will not give up, and I will not give in”.

Wire is a very different lyrical animal to Richey Edwards – something he admits and knows – as there is less of the dense, obtuse imagery. Wire is more direct, more immediately emotional, but on this form he can deliver as weighty a blow as his friend. In The Future Has Been Here 4 Ever, a relatively straight lined Wire-sung and Moore-trumpet-adorned track belies something of the Manics-redux, especially when Wire sings/writes about times

“When you can’t shake off your yesterdays

When you can’t re-write your histories”

and manages to make it not sound in any way sad….. thats a special kind of genius.

The Descent(Pages 1&2) and Auto-Intoxication are more rugged pieces, even thought the strings are still around, the former something of a companion piece to Send Away The Tigers (the track) with a nod to ELO in the understated solo, the latter (a titular reference to a medical condition where the body ends up poisoning itself), after a perfunctory opening, a less frenetic, dense and angular cousin of Faster, breaking down into a reverie-like pre-chorus before the pace whips up, and the drums pummel everything forward in a frenzy of fills and screeching guitar jabs.

Some Kind Of Nothingness is probably the highlight of the album, or at least is certainly its emotional core. Featuring the mellow growl of Ian MacCulloch in a duet with Bradfield, and a huge gospel choir, Nothingness is a beautiful paean for succour within loss and faded memory-

“Remember you, stretched out in the sun

All alone forever, conclusions foregone

Will you find some kind of nothingness?

Still and lonely like an old school photograph”.

It also features one of those breathtaking moments between the end of the middle eight and the final chorus which is truly stop-you-in-your-tracks magnificent. It’s perfection. If anyone ever asks me “why?” when it comes to music, I might just play them this song, even just that moment of it, until they give in and admit I’m right.

Hazleton Avenue could be seen as a ‘Manics-in-how-to-be-happy shock’ but not really; they don’t want life to be a shitbox, but they see that sometimes/often it is. And that’s why that which offers real peace, happiness, security, even serentity – however simplistic, banal it might seem – should be cherished (even of they do so via a tune which nags me back to Lenny Kravitz’s It Ain’t Over Til It’s Over).

This is not however a theory that the X Factor and Big Brother brigade can use as an excuse to try and validate their squalid, easily-pleased existence:

“Motion, coffee, sleep, its all I really need……. Amongst the crowd the disconnect is sweeter Alone in bed the joy is even deeper”.

This isn’t communal , it is the disconnect from the crowd and its attendant slavish attachment to what it is told to enjoy which provides comfort, and its not just a physical detatchment, more a state of mind where you “Don’t need a wilderness to feel solitary”. Musically the serenity is reflected in the airy string and guitar figure, and the almost jaunty tempo and lightly shuffling rhythmic pattern. Here the band handle the lightness of touch much easier than in past times, with less of the blanding out of tracks such as Be Natural or Black Dog On My Shoulder.

Popular culture, and it’s often stultifying effect on people is more acutely examined on other parts of Postcards... . A Billion Balconies Facing The Sun is a blistering, metallic crash though the modern, increasingly virtual world and provides a searing critique of what Bradfield has called the “cowardly peacocking” of the internet user :

"We've finally found a way to consume boredom every day

We’ve all become our personal Gods

We’ve all become so sad and lost.

A billion balconies facing the sun A billion faces turned to the screens The perfect answer to camouflage our screams”.

The sense of community online is nothing but a fallacy, a pantomime of self-regard and self-absorption, the latest flashy toy to distract us from the world's less palatable (and therefore less profitable) realities, despite all the wealth of information it provides . Don’t Be Evil (key line - "fill the world with your own importance") offers a similar attack on faceless web-posturing, invoking more of a sense of responsibility for and courage in what we populate our web pages with. Yes I know I’m writing this on an internet blog, I get the point. But at least I do get the point.

All We Make Is Entertainment is more double edged, a barb at the ubiquity of what we laughably call an entertainment industry, but the major target is the lack of any other proper industry making anything of substance and value anymore, and in turn valuing the skills and craft involved therein-

“All we make is entertainment A sad indictment of what we're good at We're all part of the grand delusion

…..

All we make is entertainment It's so damn easy, and inescapable We're so post-modern, We're so post-everything

……

All we make is entertainment An end to hope and civilisation A simple way to seek perfection”.

It is also an attack on what is behind that veil of entertainment; a government who, as Wire put it recently “lie to us and … make the rules up as you go along.” -

“Please don't tell the nation of being exposed It only confirms what we already know Pointless jobs just lead to pointless lives Breaking up our bones, breaking up our minds”.

The most overtly political track is Golden Platitudes, a punch to the political and intellectual solar plexus delivered in a velvet musical glove. The lyric is a fantastically eloquent treatise on “the abandonment of the true working class by their own party” (Wire), the desperation voiced through a realisation of the missed opportunity of the New Labour experiment:

“Oh what a mess we‘ve made

What happened to those days where everything seemed possible?

With no-one to tell you no

Where did the feeling go?

Where did it all go wrong?

……

The liberal left destroyed every bit of my youth

Left with the barest of bones, leaving us all without

Where did it all go wrong?

Where did the feeling go?

Why colonise the moon when every different kind

of desperation exists in every single home?

Where did the feeling go?

Where did it all go wrong?”.

There are simply no veneers to this record – yes it’s big, bold, brash, but it is never glossy, or over-polished, nothing feels embellished (in its truest sense of dressing up with fictitious adornments). This is the Manic Street Preachers at their very most life affirming, offering a real, raw, pristine soundtrack by which to navigate everything our culture throws at us. If the ‘golden era’ for MSP is the Generation Terrorists through Everything Must Go era, then it’s also fair to suggest there were doubts after the This Is My Truth – Know Your Enemy – Lifeblood series whether there would be a second ; thankfully for all of us there is, and it could be right at its zenith now. But if they can come back and better this…..they might just save the world after all.

(All direct band quotes taken from http://www.columbia.co.uk/artists/manic_street_preachers/)