So which Manic Street Preachers do we get this time? Is it the widescreen Manics, with their terrace anthems and Technicolor bleakness? Or is it the post-punk Manics, all terse, screaming riffs, balaclavas and slogans like a very cold Clash? The answer with Critical Thinking is neither. With this new record they’re not pretending to be Magazine or Guns N’ Roses. They’re not even pretending to be themselves.
This is a much more raw Manic Street Preachers, fuelled by despair as usual but also simplicity. The songs are rock throughout, with big, crunchy riffs by James Dean Bradfield and small-doubt-filled lyrics by Nicky Wire. There are also vocals by Nicky Wire, most notably on the Robocop-funk title track and the brilliant closing track One Man Militia, where, over drums reminiscent of the Sex Pistols’ No Fun, Wire lists his personal reasons to be uncheerful: ‘I don’t know what I am for but I know what I’m against’ and ‘I can’t breathe when I hate this much’.
There are proper drivetime punk anthems, naturally, like recent single Decline And Fall, which shares its sense of the epic with The Mighty Wah!, and there are songs with classically Manics titles, like Brush Strokes Of Reunion – which sadly doesn’t feature Karl Howman as a painter and decorator.
People Ruin Paintings is stadium jazz, while Being Baptised is a pop song, almost. Throughout, passion and doubt run side by side, most notably on the oddly plaintive Dear Stephen, a song that basically asks Morrissey to stop being a twat.
People who like to compare things to other things will note that this album shares some of its rawness with Postcards From A Young Man, and its affection for rock with Gold Against The Soul, but really it doesn’t sound like any Manics album. It lacks the smoothness of their recent retro-Euro albums, and tempers the fury with a vein of melancholy.
The three founding members of the Manic Street Preachers are in their mid-50s now, a time when for most artists being your own archive beckons. At this stage – 30-odd years and 15 albums – the Manic Street Preachers should be playing heritage rock shows and releasing albums to fill up the time between greatest-hits tours. Critical Thinking shows that with the Manics, rage never sleeps.
