http://drownedinsound.

com/in_depth/4146845-in-defence-of-the-melancholy-manicstreet-preachers

In defence of... the melancholy Manic

Street Preachers
by Marc Burrows 6 comments 10:51 September 12th, 2013

Here's a great indie-bores pub game, it's called 'What year should the Manic Street Preachers
have split up?' Accepted wisdom probably puts it at 1994, after the nihilistic, furious Holy Bible.
After Richey. Others will generously extend to 1996, at their man-at-C&A-rugby-clubsingalong-"we-only-wanna-GET-DRUNK" every-man peak. After that, apparently, they went
boring, to be struck off the creative guestlist forever. The most annoying thing about the Manic
Street Preachers, so say the bores, is their refusal to admit defeat, roll over and die. Its a bollocks
opinion. They should have split up in 1992 (when they said they would) or not at all. Its
laughable to suggest their creative spark winked out with the 20th century, or vanished with their
guitarist.
What's rarely said is this: The best Manics songs are the sad ones, the ones we're not supposed
to like: the bleak, the melancholy and the beautiful. Its an element thats been in their DNA
since the very beginning; a peculiarly Welsh rain-soaked misery that undercuts some of their
bolshiest, brattiest moments. Motorcycle Emptiness is soaked in the stuff and they wrote that
before theyd even left the valleys. Their new album, Rewind The Film embraces it fully,
dripping a slow, resigned sadness. Theres no false bravado, no attempts to recapture lost youth,
it's a record about ageing, accepting and mourning and in doing so, in a still and sad way,
celebrating what you have lost. It's the best thing they've done in a decade.
This is the first of two upcoming albums. The next one, 2014s Futurology is -according to Nicky
Wire- the next step on from The Holy Bible and Journal For Plague Lovers. If thats the case
then Rewind The Film is the next link in a series that began in 1998 with This Is My Truth, Tell
Me Yours and continued with 2004s icy, chronically underrated LIfeblood. These are albums that
turned inward and followed a quieter musical path to the storm and bluster of the bands punk or
indie-rock incarnations.
People talk of The Holy Bible being the band's masterpiece, but theres a strong case to be made
that its actually This Is My Truth.... Its an utterly despairing record, the first time Wire would
write an entire Manics album alone found him sick of being sick, tired of being tired, bored
with being bored and fucked with being fucked. Even its most obviously commercial moment
was called You Stole The Sun From My Heart and ended with Wire proclaiming he had got to
stop smiling, it gives the wrong impression. This Is My Truth... is an album by a band baffled
and grieving for a missing friend and uncomfortable with their place in the musical landscape.

Wires words inspired James Dean Bradfield and Sean Moore to create the most delicate, sparse
arrangements of their career so far, there's hardly any big "rock" songs here yet the funeral beats
and retro-futurism yield some of the bands best work- 'Ready For Drowning' and 'If You Tolerate
This Your Children Will Be Next' are both powerful and astonishingly bleak- that the latter
became their first number one remains one of the more glorious corners of pop history- a little
victory for melancholy art.
Though the album received plaudits and gold-discs aplenty its bleakness proved a turn-off for a
contingent of fans and critics whod failed to realise the band had been this miserable pretty
much all along. Again and again their strongest songs have been their saddest- amid the rage of
The Holy Bible is Wires This Is Yesterday, Richey Edwards Small Black Flowers That Grow
In The Sky sits on the euphoric Everything Must Go and the spiky and confused Know Your
Enemy peaks with James Dean Bradfields heartbreaking Ocean Spray. B-sides, like 'Too Cold
Here', 'Sepia' and Bradfield's shattering solo cover of -of all things- Art Garfunkle's 'Bright Eyes'
show the band had pointed this way for years.
If This Is My Truth... polarised some fans, then Lifeblood, six years on, would completely baffle
them. Again the band turned inward, and this time there was something cold and clinical in
Wire's words and Bradfield and Moore's odd soundscapes, the isolation and despair seemed to
have frozen into stranger shapes than before. There's some of the bands most beautiful work
here: 'A Song For A Departure' is still-born Motown while 'Fragments' and 'Empty Souls' are
weird soul music via the Nebraska-era Springsteen and Joy Division. It remains their most
underrated and ignored record, but also one of their most rewarding.
Each Manics album since The Holy Bible (with the arguable exception of Send Away The Tigers
shape-throwing rockisms) have plumbed the depths of despair for their best moments, be that the
graceful, elegant 4 Ever Delayed from the Lipstick Traces B-sides compilation, the odd, stilted
There By The Grace Of God, This Joke Sport Severed from Journal For Plague Lovers or the
sweeping orchestral soul of Golden Platitudes from Postcards From A Young Man. Go further
back and youll find Little Baby Nothing, La Tristesse Durera, Life Becoming A Landslidetheyre suicide ballads, beautifully wrought melodies of misery, each a little breadcrumb of
sadness leading the way to Rewind The Film. There are those who prefer the Manic Street
Preachers furious and fast, those that prefer them anthemic and every-man, and there are those
that would prefer them lost in the past and bothering them no more. Theres no sign of them
stopping now though, to paraphrase the Manics paraphrasing Vincent Van Gough: this sadness
will never go away.