ALBUM: "Journal for Plague Lovers" - Manic Street Preachers (Sony, 2009)

To this day, the Manic Street Preachers’ third album, The Holy Bible, stands as one of the greatest anomalies in the history of popular music. Previously, the Manics had been known as third-rate Guns’n’Roses wannabes churning out god-awful, meaningless ‘anthems’ like Motorcycle Emptiness under the banner of some undefined revolution. For all the band’s radical posturing, however, to all but the most devoted fans they came across as all style and precious little substance: only the singles La Tristesse Durera and From Despair to Where hinted that there was anything going on behind the eyeliner. When it quietly emerged in the wake of Kurt Cobain’s suicide and against the upcoming backdrop of Britpop, The Holy Bible sounded like the work of a completely different band: no-one expected an artistic vision so focused from such an unlikely source, and even fewer were prepared for the savage, grubby, misanthropic brilliance of an album which is rightly regarded as their finest hour. Imagine if King Adora suddenly came out with In Utero three albums in: that’s the kind of U-turn we’re talking about. Witty, lacerating, dark, compulsive, horrifying: The Holy Bible is all these things and more. “He’s a boy; you want a girl, so cut off his cock / Tie his hair in bunches, fuck him, call him Rita if you want”. Nothing the Manics did before or since has ever come close to topping it; it was, as journalist Keith Cameron so aptly put it, “A triumph of art over logic”.


Nevertheless, it was an album born of circumstance rather than any kind of sustained inspiration or artistic rebirth - namely the increasingly troubled mindset of iconic guitarist/lyricist Richey Edwards, who disappeared shortly after the album’s release and hasn’t been seen since. Following 1996’s transitional epic Everything Must Go, the remaining trio has soldiered on manfully to become a tired, puffy behemoth churning out album after album of catatonic snooze-rock. If Richey’s still knocking about beneath the floorboards somewhere, even he would be hard-pushed to raise a smirk at the fact that the band’s biggest-seller– the stadium-conquering This is My Truth, Tell Me Yours - was also its most crushingly uninspired, spawning two of the biggest yawn-inducers in recent memory in the form of The Everlasting and If You Tolerate This, Your Children Will Be Next (oh, stop it). Even the much-vaunted ‘return to form’ of 2007’s Send Away the Tigers doesn’t really withstand sustained scrutiny: if its breezy summertime romping sounded vaguely… well, good, one suspects that’s only because the records that preceded it were so spectacularly flatulent that even the sound of Nicky Wire farting in a jar would’ve sounded promising by comparison. “I live to fall asleep”, James Dean Bradfield cooed on one particularly emblematic track from the ironically-named Lifeblood. You and us both, mate.


Make no mistake, Journal for Plague Lovers is the band’s shot at artistic redemption. While it’s perhaps unfair to rate their latest efforts alongside one of the greatest albums of the last 20 years, it’s difficult to mistake the band’s intentions this time around. The adverts for the album loudly proclaim “Lyrics: Edwards; Music: Bradfield/Wire/Moore”. Same cover artist (Jenny Saville), same font and typeface; it’s even produced by Steve Albini in a bid to replicate the low-down, grizzly feel of its predecessor. Completists have the option of shelling out for a deluxe edition featuring Richey’s lyrics and artwork laid out for slavish analysis. Clearly, this is IMPORTANT STUFF. It’s the band revisiting history, delving back into the darkest hour that produced a masterpiece. While evidently not quite an attempt to replicate The Holy Bible’s hermetic breeding-ground of self-disgust, it’s an official sequel of sorts, filtering the rage, satire and anguish through a decade and a half of embattled life experience.

And therein lies the rub. Last time around, the airtight synthesis of music and lyrics formed a perfect union: chief musical architect Bradfield was at the very top of his game, winding a series of suffocating motifs around dense, claustrophobic verses whose payoff invariably came at the point of most resistance, triggering a chorus that detonated from within to unleash a burst of melody so colourful that it sounded like rapture erupting from the bowels of Hell. It was invigorating precisely because no-one expected it from a band with just three good songs and a load of hot air to their name. In the years that followed, however, the Manics’ gradual metamorphosis into the lumbering rock dinosaurs one suspects they always were underneath appears to have nullified much of that source of initial inspiration. Consequently, Journal for Plague Lovers is an album packing heat but largely firing blanks, its scuzzy underlying intentions consistently undermined by a creative consciousness unable to cast off the shackles of mediocrity.


It all starts so promisingly with the opening minute of Peeled Apples. The ominous quotes from various media sources – such a distinctive, unnerving distinguishing feature of The Holy Bible - are back. Wire’s bass rumbles in like the bastard son of Archives of Pain; Bradfield and Moore spar restlessly as the riffs spike, slice and rip accordingly. It’s all going so well until… oh, god. They reference Chomsky. Chomsky! Before we go any further, let’s just clear up this matter once and for all: there are certain things that should never appear in any song. The word ‘juxtaposed’ is one (take note, Super Furry Animals). Name-checking Noam Chomsky is another - save it for the 6^th Form Sociology essay, lads. It’s an incidental moment, admittedly, but one which ties the song’s laces in knots so that it stumbles to the finish-line rather than sprints.


Indeed, the band’s overly reverent approach to its source text is Journal’s Achilles heel throughout, as demonstrated further in its lead single, Jackie Collins Existential Question Time. A great title in desperate need of a song, on the page it’s a terse antisocial screed hinging on the killer tag-line “Oh mummy, what’s a sex pistol?” On record, it becomes little more than a stand-alone one-liner which deserves so much more than the lifeless, uninspired plod of a hook that accompanies it. By the time the visceral rage of the chorus erupts from the song’s grimy underbelly (the closest we get to a true Holy Bible moment throughout), it’s too little, too late – you want more of that and much, much less of everything that came before. Fittingly, it’s all over within two-and-a-half minutes, at precisely the point when it was becoming interesting.


Indeed, if The Holy Bible had a weakness, it’s that the lyrics – apparently written independently from the music, and thus prescriptive rather than responsive – often put a stranglehold on Bradfield’s ability to weave conventional melodic structures around them. This time around, the verbiage positively spills off the page. For every great bit of off-the-cuff sloganeering (“It’s the facts of life, sunshine!” being one particularly choice soundbite), there’s a dozen examples of Edwards’ words blazing a trail that the band simply can’t keep up with. Facing Page: Top Left is by far the worst offender, undercut throughout by a meter that’s just plain ridiculous. “This beauty here dipping neophobia”, Bradfield croons, apparently oblivious to the fact that what might look effective on the page often has no place in linear melodic form. ‘This beauty here dipping neophobia’?! For the love of Richard Nixon!


Musically, Sean Moore does his part by contributing some rattling 16-beats, but Bradfield’s inability to conquer his worst vice – a penchant for lounge-tinged, easy-listening chord sequences that even The Walker Brothers would’ve balked at – often renders the melodies inert, drab and lifeless where they should seethe and scythe. As Send Away the Tigers suggested, the band are most effective nowadays when they jettison their artier aspirations in favour of a more conventional approach, and the best tracks here are often the most straightforward: Pretension//Repulsion and Me and Stephen Hawking are curiously chirpy larks whose rolling verses shed a ray of melodic sunlight on the proceedings, whereas the Cure-esque Marlon J.D. is a real standout - clearly the song Motorcycle Emptiness wishes it was, both in content and execution.


For the most part though the album offers moments of inspiration bobbing desperately in a tide of mediocrity. This Joke Sport Severed is fairly pretty for about thirty seconds before completely losing focus and then piling on the strings in a belated attempt to add a sense of depth and grandeur. Doors Closing Slowly is drab to the point of abject misery. The title track sounds unnervingly like the Foo Fighters’ Learn to Fly. Generally speaking (and god knows, I’ve wasted hours of my life debating the ‘merits’ of lumpen tripe like Little Baby Nothing to have ample experience in this matter), Manic Street Preachers fans are among the most blinkered, humourless devotees going, but you’d have to be either stone deaf or a complete idiot to consider the album’s closing track, the Nicky Wire-sung William’s Last Words, anything other than an appalling, tuneless dirge. If Edwards saw it as a shot at an unofficial suicide note, it’s ill-served by a man who manages to make lines like “Isn’t it lovely when the dawn brings the dew?” sound like the ramblings of a cheap greeting-card rather than the dignified exit Edwards intended. Atmosphere, it ain’t.


Wire, the perpetually smackable faux-controversy merchant, is no doubt very pleased with himself for putting out an album which, in his mind at least, will re-affirm the Manics’ position as the most revolutionary and vital band Britain has ever produced. Their fans will be all-too-quick to proclaim it a masterpiece. The simple fact remains, however, that only once in their 20-year history were the Manics ever half as clever as they thought they were. The fanaticism of their fanbase has built up an ill-deserved mystique around the band - in terms of influence, significance and overall musical achievement, the Manics just aren't all that important. In spite of its creators’ pretensions, in spite of their empty rhetoric – indeed, in spite of everything - The Holy Bible remains not just a modern classic, but one of the greatest records ever made. I wanted to love their new offering so desperately; more than any release in recent memory, it was something I was eager to get wrapped up in, pore over, digest and savour. As it stands, Journal for Plague Lovers is occasionally good, mostly average, but rarely great. And that’s just not going to cut it for your big redemptive gambit.