Manic Street Preachers: Lifeblood

I had my hair cut today, and as I was lying in the chair having my hair washed, ‘There by the Grace of God’ by the Manic Street Preachers came on the salon CD player. It was a bit of a surprise to hear that particular song in such surroundings, but as I had nothing else to do for the next four minutes, I could just listen to it with undivided attention. And that's when you realise it's a great song. A really, really good song, it's subtle and subdued, and gently played. When it was released as part of the band's greatest hits package two years ago, it pointed out a new and exciting direction for the Manics, where every song didn't have to be delivered at breakneck speed and louder than war.

And there's a but....

During the promotion of the greatest hits CD, Nicky Wire mentioned the words elegiac and pop in the same sentence, within the context of the next album. And this may be where their path has faltered. The Manics have never been great thinkers. Obviously, they're probably still the most intelligent and culturally forthright band in Britain. If it wasn't for their influence, I probably wouldn't be writing this now. But their true strength lay in their spleen, their visceral and primal urges. If you need evidence, look at their two best albums, 1994's the Holy Bible and 1996's Everything Must Go. Both albums were driven by lyricists struggling to define their world and how their internal turmoils affected them. Two albums straight from the heart, rather than the head.

What's most notable about this album is the lyrics. Nick Jones/Nicky Wire has ceased lashing out and has opened his heart more explicitly than he ever has before. We get love songs for his wife and his daughter, and one of the few songs to be officially declared by its author to be about missing lyricist/occasional guitarist Richey James Edwards.

And maybe because the lyrical structure has changed, this has affected the way vocalist/guitarist James Dean Bradfield writes the music. He no longer has to write melodies around reams of stream of conscientiousness lyrics with no meter. And maybe he needs that challenge.

And it starts so promisingly as well. ‘1985’ meanders from intro to verse before unleashing a grimly determined chorus, preluded with an acrobatic melodica line, overall being reminiscent of Depeche Mode.

For whatever reason, the band decided to release arguably the weakest song on the album 'The Love of Richard Nixon' as the first single. It's not a bad song in all honesty, though it's not the obvious choice for the first taster of the new album. Wire draws parallels between Nixon and the Manics (being remembered for one thing in your life) over a bed of keyboards and beeps, and it's two-and-a-half minutes before James Dean Bradfield's guitar makes an appearance. It some respects, it's reminiscent of 'If You Tolerate This'.

Empty Souls begins with a spartan piano riff that puts you in mind of 'Clocks' by Coldplay, but it just doesn't get going at all. It's not helped at all by a clumsily Wire-esque couplet "Collapsing like the twin towers/falling down like April showers." Slated as the album's second single, it may do well in a commercial context, but it does nothing for the album as a whole.

‘A Song for Departure’ is probably symptomatic for the album as a whole. It is a departure of sorts, with Wire's ever improving bass and Sean Moore's drums solidly keeping the beat, but the song just doesn't go anywhere. It longs for a chorus far superior to the one it possesses, with Bradfield banally repeating "This is a song, a song for departure" over and over again. The two guitar solos do nothing for the song either.

‘I Live to Fall Asleep’ is a great example of what could have been. Over warm piano chords, Bradfield croons Wire's longing for a simple life. It would be hard to imagine the Manics with Richey in the band releasing a song like this, but it works wonderfully well.

‘To Repel Ghosts’ sounds like early U2 covering the theme tune to The Snowman. Hmm. But don't worry it's better than it sounds. Just.

‘Emily’ is the worst song on the album. A poor lyric dressed up in a less than serviceable song, it goes nowhere and does nothing, unlike the subject of the song, Emily Pankhurst.

‘Glasnost’ is another departure, and another success story. Bradfield enters with a coruscating guitar riff, a rare specimen on this album, and ushers the song through to the oddly formed chorus, and on to probably the best guitar solo he's played since ‘The Everlasting’. It's another warm song, which seem to be the more successful tracks.

‘Always/Never’ is a rare piece where the music was written before the lyrics, and also features Wire playing slap bass, perhaps inspired by working with Tony Visconti, who produced some of the other tracks on the album. It's a solid enough song, though nothing spectacular, unlike ‘Solitude Sometimes Is’, which almost rivals ‘The Girl Who Wanted to be God’ for sheer scale and ambition. From a modest acoustic guitar intro, it builds and builds until Bradfield sings "Drop your bombs on all that I see" with conviction that had been lacking from this album, the passion that the Manics had made their watch word.

Again, ‘Fragments’ could have been a great song. It progresses from a dreamy introduction into a sparse but melodic verse into...well a bit of a let down of a chorus. It feels like an anti-climax.

‘Cardiff Afterlife’ is about Nicky Wire's memories of Richey Edwards, and according to James Dean Bradfield, the euphoric verses emerging from the ugly barbed refrain is indicative of how the band felt after coming to terms with Edward's disappearance. Bradfield's gently soothing harmonica gives the song real emotional weight.

The most frustrating thing about this record is if you were to play just the first and last tracks, you would think that the Manics had achieved their aim of making an album of elegiac pop. It's just a shame the books don't live up to their bookends...