Review: Manic Street Preachers – Journal for Plague Lovers (2009)
It’s a bit tough to review the music proper on Journal for Plague Lovers without burrowing into the story behind it – the two are so strongly intertwined that they very nearly define one another.
The band, formed in 1986, was originally a quartet. In winter 1995, however, rhythm guitarist and lyricist Richey Edwards (famously volatile – he used a razor to carve the phrase ’4 REAL’ into his arm after a music journalist suggested that Manic Street Preachers lacked authenticity) went missing, and hasn’t been found since. While the band remained together, and continued to write and release albums long after his disappearance, it’s with Journal, their ninth studio album, that they finally seem to be attempting to put Edwards’ memory to rest. The lyrics here are dark and literate, culled from a small portfolio of work that Edwards gave to band member Nicky Wire only a few weeks before disappearing, and the respect and passion with which the band treats the material is evident. In a sense, Journal is both a derivative of Edwards’ life and, the band hopes, a memorial to it.
It’s comforting, then, that the album works.
Musically, there’s a comfortably homey sort of mac-and-cheese quality to things; it’s solid Brit-rock with a sharp, nostalgic whiff of the 90s. Edwards’ lyrics, however, are crumbled bacon, rich and heavy and keeping things far more tasty than they have any right to be. Not to say that the music itself is bad per se – just that it’s often not, by its own merits, buoyant enough to support a few stanzas of dead weight and still keep its head above water (cf. Muse’s Black Holes and Revelations). With Edwards’ help, though, the album often noses its way into quality. Opening track “Peeled Apples,” is a good example of this; superficially, it’s your standard-issue mosh-pit anthem, floating pleasantly atop a scowling, grimy, radio-ready bass line. But as a track, it’s propelled by words (“riderless horses on Chomsky’s Camelot / bruises on my hands from digging my nails out / a series of images against you and me / trespass your torment if you are who you want to be”), and the intrigue of those words keeps the track afloat. So too does “Jackie Collins Existential Question Time,” which has all the hallmarks of a great single, but, as we’re slammin’ out the air guitar, slyly asks us “if a married man / a married man fucks a Catholic / and his wife dies without knowing / does it make him unfaithful, people?” – which is just the sort of thing I like to think about when I’m half-conscious and puttering along in morning traffic. The interplay of pleasant and prickly here is like cinnamon toast spiked with habañeros.
Manic Street Preachers’ “She Bathed Herself In A Bath of Bleach,” from Journal for Plague Lovers.
There are a solid handful of standout tracks – the aforementioned “Jackie Collins” is one, as is hard-rocking “She Bathed Herself in a Bath of Bleach,” which sounds as though it might cause nearby hotel rooms to spontaneously wreck themselves. Acoustic track “Facing Page: Top Left” also works quite well, a delicately orchestrated criticism of Western beauty culture that has vocalist James Dean Bradfield deftly sputtering its refrain as a single uninterrupted string of syllables (“thisbeautiadippineophobia!”). But perhaps the high point of the album, musically and thematically, is the closing track, “William’s Last Words,” a peaceful, melancholy sigh of a song that can’t help but strike the listener as Edwards’ own gentle goodbye (“leave me, go Jesus, I love you / yeah, I love you / just let me go / I even love the devil / but yes, he did me harm / don’t keep me any longer / ‘cos I’m really tired / I’d love to go to sleep / and wake up happy”).
Journal for Plague Lovers, musically, is a bit of a chimera: catchy Brit-pop for the depressed literati, a sort of love child of Damon Albarn and Craig Finn. As an experience, though, it’s a little harder to quantify. There’s a great deal of genuine pathos, sometimes leavened by the pop music on which it rests, sometimes amplified; one gets the impression that the album was made as much for the band themselves as for the audience. The mad swings between glistening, cynical rock and honest, uncoiled emotion paint a fascinating picture of a group that has spent the greater part of its career living in the shadow of a missing friend. A sense of purpose washes over the album, bare and honest in its softer moments, while in others marked only by a sharp jab of the quill. Some might perceive the album’s whole concept as a sort of emotional exploitation, but it’s hard to be cynical when Manic Street Preachers sound so fully committed, so naked, and so, well, real. I imagine Edwards would be satisfied.
