Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 24/07/06
Label: SonyBMG

For starters, the song titles are great. "Bad Boys And Painkillers", "On Saturday Morning We Will Rule The World", and "Say Hello To The Pope". Everything else? Well, nothing would give us more spiteful pleasure than to be able to report that the pontiff of pomp, the Napster nemesis, has produced a turkey, a blooper, a dud. Trouble is, we can't. This feels like the most personal, passionate project he's ever undertaken. And - in defiance of everyone who left the auditorium at "Know Your Enemy" - he's done it with restraint.

The Manics' frontman's solo debut album is named after Brunel's famous railway, a milestone of Victorian engineering which in the late '80s carried the teenager from South Wales to London - and brought him back again whenever it all got a bit much. This journey provides the subject matter of much of the album - during MSP's break after the "Lifeblood" tour, Bradfield found himself sitting on the same train again, making the same journey, and copious notes. The first visit to his hometown of mentor / publicist, the late Philip Hall ("An English Gentleman") is captured with nostalgic affection.

Nowhere, however, is this spiritual and physical trip better captured than in standout track "Émigré" ("Twenty years of leaving / And you never knew the reasons / Two hundred pounds of sleepers / Taking you nearer") whose Beach Boys-ish "ooh-la-la-la"s and ticking drums resound with euphoria. Impressively - and perhaps unconsciously - this journey also determines the album's sound. It's big, coal-powered, and cast-in-iron (as was The Delgado's "The Great Eastern", inspired by one of Brunel's other feats).

Appropriately, it also contains a fair shovelful of grit and soil, grease and sweat. But more specifically, tracks like "On Saturday Morning We Will Rule The World" actually sound like a train, pulling slowly out of their stations before hitting their top speed courtesy of pacey gear-changes as cheerily jolting as that in Queen's "Don't Stop Me". The album's revelation, however, has to be the Jacques Brel cover "To See A Friend In Tears", delivered on acoustic guitar (the synth strings should have been replaced by a bowed saw - but now we're quibbling).

It is modest, lucid and tender. Being about war, of course, it's also conveniently topical - and what better epitaph for modern London through the eyes of one who has escaped than: "Our cities are exhausted / Made by and for the Middle Age"? "It feels like a holiday / Holiday!" James Dean Bradfield sings at one point - and with such gusto you wonder if he is in fact describing this sabbatical from the ever-more-wearying day job.

    by Anna Britten