Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 18/05/09
Label: Sony

Like Marlon Brando, one of the many icons namechecked on "Journal For Plague Lovers", the Manic Street Preachers' career has been one of turbulence and unpredictability. Like him, they have lurched from youthful insolence to flabby self indulgence, hit stunning commercial peaks and slumped into near-irrelevance, endured crushing personal tragedies and enjoyed surprise revivals.

So it's not entirely shocking that this follow-up to the exuberantly poppy "Send Away The Tigers" is the band's most dense and difficult record in 15 years. There is a certain inevitability at work here, after all: if "Send Away The Tigers" sounded like a band coming to terms with their shattering past, then "Journal For Plague Lovers" is the sound of them fully embracing it, without flinching. And that past, of course, means Richey Edwards, the album's posthumous lyricist and intellectual architect, missing 14 years but declared dead just six months ago.

A devastating genesis, then, but does "Journal For Plague Lovers" live up to it? No (what could?) but it comes breathtakingly close. It revisits the word-choked, sonically scarred rage of "The Holy Bible" (the last album Edwards appeared on while alive) but retains the naked beauty of their best later records. And though there are moments where it lapses into the MOR plod that is the band's Achilles' heel, they are few.

The most obvious echoes of "The Holy Bible" lie in the feral lunge of "Peeled Apples", the murky swamp of "She Bathed Herself In A Bath Of Bleach" and the splenetic, kinetic "Marlon J.D.", as metallic and abrasive as the edge of a rusty razor blade. But some of the softer songs pack just as much gut punching impact: just hear the chiming, childlike refrain of "Jackie Collins Existential Question Time" or the aching vulnerability of "This Joke Sport, Severed". This record knows as much about sadness as it does about fury.

Inevitably, much attention will be paid to Edwards' rescued lyrics, which showcase both his formidably eclectic intellect (the searing "All Is Vanity") and his weakness for slogan-happy showboating ("Pretension/Repulsion", as ungainly and blustery as its title, and with music to match.) But the most moving moments are when the music resonates in perfect sympathy with Richey's worldview, as on "William's Last Words", where the awkward sentimentality of the lyric and the even more awkward Nicky Wire vocal somehow create something both beautiful and truly, truly heartbreaking.

A record as sincere, complex and emotionally loaded as "Journal For Plague Lovers" probably warrants lengthy polemics and dissertations as much as the snapshot of a pop review. Well, they will come along soon enough: for now just know that this is something unique, often flawed and often flooring, and as fine and fitting a memorial for its lyricist as could be imagined.

    by Jaime Gill