|
Do not go gently The South Wales terriers’ thirteenth album comes laden with melody and dread, bark and bite. Unlucky for some, says Keith Cameron.
It’s easy to decode the metaphorical subtext to the new Manic Street Preachers album. The sleeve features a vintage print of one of Japan’s last samurai warriors. He wears the armour but in his heavy-lidded eyes he knows it’s over, his skills and customs bypassed by progress. He is, as the final song on Resistance Is Futile says, “Waiting to be left behind.”
This year marks the 30th anniversary of the first Manics single and you can feel midlife angst oozing through the fabric of their thirteenth album. Its opening lyrics are “People get tired/People get old.” It closes with an elegy sung by “a lonesome warrior” – alias Nicky Wire – who’s “Feeling like an animal/The one that time forgot.” As connoisseurs of the higher sporting arts, the Manics know there’s nothing sadder than the sight of yesterday’s generation terrorist lingering at the crease... Yet deep down, which master batsman doesn’t feel he’s got another great innings left to play?
At a particularly low ebb last year, Nicky Wire publicly questioned whether the Manics would even make another album. Then, as in the past, spiritual nourishment came from art: International Blue, a meditation on nouveau realist French painter Yves Klein set to a devastatingly maximalist musical theme, provided focus. Wire had been chipping away at the lyric for five years, but it took Sean Moore’s mechanoid drum heroics and James Dean Bradfield’s levitating guitar and vocal melodies to give it life. This great aspirational rock band was duly catalysed once more. Like the song itself says: “I saw that colour – and I knew I had to go.”
If 2014’s avant-rock Euro travelogue Futurology arguably had too much intellectual energy, Resistance Is Futile flips the equation: in lieu of obvious big thematic linkage, it deals in heightened levels of musicality. The obvious antecedent from the band’s catalogue is 1996’s Everything Must Go: opulent orchestration, soaring choruses, broad melodic strokes. Opener People Give In references the artillery drum outro from A Design For Life, while the pealing piano motif that exhorts International Blue from airbrushed road anthem verse into thrumming chorus suggests the Associates’ 1982 single Party Fears Two, an outré hit produced by Mike Hedges, the man who also produced EMG.
In the 20 years since that album and its successor This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours propelled the Manics beyond cult fame, the band have become manifestly more accomplished composers, capable of alchemising the least prepossessing subject matter into gold. On paper, a song about Chicago nanny Vivian Maier, whose cache of street photographs was largely unseen until after her death, is a dry proposition, but the reality is revelatory: opening as a piano and strings lament, Vivian dovetails into the rueful exultation of late-’70s Fleetwood Mac; the moment when Catherine Anne Davies arrives as the Nicks to Bradfield’s Buckingham is pure heart damage.
Davies deservedly gets a spotlight moment in Dylan And Caitlin, trading verses with Bradfield in character as 20th century literature’s definitive rock’n’roll couple Dylan and Caitlin Thomas. There’s more hero worship with In Eternity, which offers Manic touchstone David Bowie some endearingly soppy lyrics (“I fell in love with you/Your clothes, your hair, and the sweetest of smiles”) and a sinewy vamp on the Berlin era’s ice station funk. Liverpool Revisited, meanwhile, pays homage to a city, its music, and the families of the 96 Hillsborough disaster victims; a sequel of sorts to South Yorkshire Mass Murderer from This Is My Truth..., but now the mood is euphoric, with the song’s Echo & The Bunnymen brio (“like the rain on the ocean”) decorated with the musical equivalent of a unicorn: a Nicky Wire guitar solo.
Amid its lush textures, however, Resistance Is Futile harbours a bleak undertow. Distant Colours crunches power chords into remorseful strings, as ostensibly straightforward love lyrics (“Are we living in the past/ Where there’s nothing left to fear”) insinuate a contemporary political aspect to its hopelessness. “I hate the world more than I hate myself,” confesses Bradfield, in exquisite voice, on Hold Me Like A Heaven, a bedazzled gavotte into Hounds Of Love territory and one of three songs in the album’s increasingly ashen second half to specifically address memory, its loss and curation amid the digital age’s ceaseless war against intelligence. This phase opens with Sequels Of Forgotten Wars, a pumpedup twist of Duke-vintage Genesis, offering a withering caveat for any budding guitarslingers: “A blue screen for a tribal horde.” Broken Algorithms, meanwhile, is flat-out hysterical, a tilt at the tech illuminati with startled stallion fretwork transposing 2010’s A Billion Balconies Facing The Sun’s Ballardian cyber-horror into an Iron Maiden song. Then A Song For The Sadness trashes assumptions about a Manics song with that title: bittersweet, for sure, but still euphoric orange-sunshine psych with a clink of plastic glass: “One more time in the ghetto you say...”
This is not the sound of old lags going down swinging at thin air, but a band who realise their ongoing existence brings a duty to uphold a legacy and also leave fresh traces, proving the old ways still fit the modern age. While the Manic Street Preachers of Motown Junk (“We destroy rock and roll”) resembled a musical kamikaze mission, this new album’s samurai self-identification seems apt. Beneath the surface sheen, Resistance Is Futile is a complex, multi-layered work. Within its pigments swim atomised trails of a life’s journey, new interior dialogues for mass communion, still raging against the dying of the light.
|
