Manic Street Preachers. One of the truly great band names. You forget a band's name after a while. That Coldplay and Radiohead are shockingly bad ones and Manic Street Preachers, R.E.M., The Clash and actually U2 are really rather good regardless of what you think about the band themselves.
But are Manic Street Preachers, or strangely The Manic Street Preachers as they're so often called, why the need to add an article that isn't there? Your guess is as good as mine. Are Manic Street Preachers still any good? They certainly have been over the years. Do they have anything to say that they haven't said before? Do they have any great tunes left in them?
New album The Ultra Vivid Lament doesn't really answer this question. It's astonishingly, utterly astonishingly their fourteenth album. This is a band that were supposed to implode, kill themselves or die in car or plane crashes after their first wasn't it? It was after all, all they talked about in their early interviews. But Jesus & Mary Chain before them were just the same weren't they. And they certainly went on and on, way beyond their natural lifetime to the point where their existence or records seemed utterly meaningless. At least not to me.
I certainly wouldn't say the same about Manic Street Preachers. They have plenty of reasons to exist. They mean an awful lot to an awful lot of people still for starters. The fact that they have endured and are still here, particularly given the Richie Edwards thing is enormous credit to them.They've put out plenty of good records over the years.
My feelings about The Ultra Vivid Lament are somewhat more ambivalent on first listen. Partly because it's not a good record at all. Firstly it doesn't seem to have any great tunes that stick. Always an area the band struggled with. Everything Must Go, the album of their's I like most, (I know The Holy Bible is probably their essential record but Everything is pretty damned good), is the album where they really hit the ball out of the park in respect of 'great tunes'. There are reasons why it's still their most successful and enduring mainstream album and that's one of the main ones.
The Ultra Vivid Lament has plenty of lyrics. Now there's a surprise. Nicky Wire, more than anyone else in Rock & Roll history definitely swallowed a dictionary at some point in his adolescence and has been coughing up bits of it ever since. But idespite very good words this is a record lacking in immediate earworms. Diapause, halfway through the record is probably as good as it gets here but even it's spoiled by the kind of relentless Slash guitar solo twiddling that James Dean Bradfield has always been prone to. I'm sorry James but Guns 'N' Roses are and always have been absolutely irredeemable apart from a couple of minutes of Sweet Child 'O' Mine. Glad to finally get off my chest. Now please stop it mate.
Unfortunately The Ultra Vivid Lament for the most part seems like a set of lucidly expressed soul-searching in vain pursuit of a tune. I gave up before the end. It certainly doesn't stand up as contender for 'middle age return from the abyss for 2021.' For this I direct you to Teenage Fanclub, Dinosaur Jr. and damn it, Guided By Voices who do this pretty much every six months or so. Some of Ultra Vivid borders on self-parody, particularly Black Diary Entry where Mark Lanegan joins them to rage against the dying of the light with unintentionally hilarious results (at least I assume so). I'm pretty much sure the song is meant to be profound and poignant but it strikes me as quite daft.It's actually the only song on the record I really want to listen to again because I'm still trying to work out if they're all just taking the piss.
By the time of Bradfield's umpteenth twiddly solo and another song with no perceivable tune two tracks from close I'd had enough. Manic Street Preachers are fully aware of the absurdity of the universe. They're very well read guys. There's no need to inflict this on a poor, unsuspecting world that actually rather likes and respects them. Sorry, but this is a shockingly bad record. Listen to the new Low album instead. Or else the ABBA comeback.It is evident that The Ultra Vivid Lament is quite self-consciously undeprpinned by an austere melodic drive clearly inspired by ABBA but I'm afraid I simply don't understand what the band are getting at and in any respect don't quite understand why anyone would choose to listen to this anyhow when they actually have the option of listening to the real thing.
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