This is Yesterday

The Manic Street Preachers were, as good Public Enemy fans, always Ministers of Information, adept at spreading black propaganda, making grandiose claims, public statements and generating slogans, at letting the paintings and the chosen quotes on the sleeves do the work that a lesser band would leave to the music itself. The music was always, always secondary, even that being essentially an equation, a calculation of how to achieve maximum exposure (albeit a failed one - and their initial 'Public Enemy + Guns and Roses' is a better description of the undeniably modernist, if grisly, world of late 90s nu-metal, as opposed to the MSP's early Eliot writing for Def Leppard). Recently myself and another who was a teenage Manics fan had the pleasure of explaining the group to an American philosophy lecturer who had never heard them, and he was entirely baffled - faced with the likes of 'Foucault writing lyrics for a soft metal group' he asked 'why are you trying to explain what this group are like using writers?' As such, Journal for Plague Lovers is an exemplary Manics record, of the sort they haven't made in over a decade. Not because it's 'a return to their roots', nor because of the unusually fine lyrics, but because it's such an impressive publicity stunt. Not only the exhuming of Richey Edwards' 1995 notebooks for the lyrics, but also the hiring of Albini as 'reducer', the cover artwork by Jenny Saville - an image of a feral-looking child with a facial resemblance to Edwards, which will be covered in Smell the Glove fashion in supermarkets, because it apparently looks like a 'battered child' - in sum, their incredibly explicit attempt to remake what is by far their finest record. 

I am all the things that you regret

It's all a magnificent propaganda effort, and it clearly worked - for one thing it actually made me want to hear their new record. It's here that the Manics suddenly seem rather less clever, but more a group locked into a grim Groundhog Day loop of their own making. There's a very well- established sequence now - the slick, scrupulously well-produced commercial record (Gold against the Soul, This is my Truth, Lifeblood), invariably followed by the fierce 'return to roots', the angry, messy glam/punk record (The Holy Bible, Know Your Enemy, Send Away the Tigers), with ever-diminishing returns. The last album I heard all the way through was the embarrassing Know Your Enemy, a record whose cringeworthy nature can be gleaned from its titles as much from the fundamentally irrelevant music - 'Baby Elian', 'My Guernica'. With the others, I heard the godawful singles and that was more than enough. But with this one, I pitched an article to a prominent publication (eventually decommissioned, perhaps mercifully) in which I would have some sort of reckoning with the group, one who, with their unashamed style-over-substance, their lyrical density and their obsessions (at least circa 1994 - 20th century history/history of ideas, Soviet imagery, post-punk, body horror) are as much an influence on how I ended up as a writer as the less embarrassing groups I might cite from time to time. So I got a press pack, a pile of papers combining the (all-important) lyric sheet with trite sleevenotes by John Niven (whither Octave Mirbeau, inadvertent writer of The Holy Bible's epigraph?) and a hilarious page where the Manics explained the 'musical ideas' behind each track. Eg: 'Closest we have ever sounded to Nirvana with a Sixties pop sensibility and a Steve Jones guitar solo' or 'Deep Chamber of Sorrow Drums - Velvets doom march - hearbreaking ticking clock volcanic ending', an amusing reminder that the Manics are basically music journalists who somehow ended up making music instead. I was all ready to denounce this as one of the grossest examples yet of rock necrophilia, the ventriloquy of a (presumed) dead man's notebooks as a grisly culmination of the Mojo/Uncut world of morbid museum culture which has become rock music's ultimate terminus.

a dwarf takes his cockerel out of the cockfight; vultures attack the pigeons, in the West Wing at night

Listening to 'Peeled Apples', the opening track, you suddenly think (or at least I think) - this - this extremely belated attempt to provide some sort of continuation of The Holy Bible's blocked promise - might actually work. The music is fierce, pounding post-grunge (not a genre I would usually tarry with, of course), the lyrics throw together self-harm, imperial delusions, sloganeering ('the Levi jean has always been stronger than the Uzi'), cockfights and torture, with oblique wit - all translated into a controlled barking not heard from James Dean Bradfield for 15 years. It's a footnote, but what a footnote. Stepping back a moment. The Holy Bible, as I've written before, is a very fucking weird record. In an NME context it might seem sonically extreme, but this is entirely relative. For all the John McGeoch guitars and Bradfield's impassioned, heroic yammering, the memorable effect is more to do with the breathtaking (accidental?) audacity of combining the horrendous, brilliant, lyrics with big choruses, guitar heroics, rockist dynamics and minor, but extremely effective use of sampling. I can think of few things in any music as chilling as the voices that punctuate the record (eg, JG Ballard, plummily intoning 'I wanted to rub the human face in its own vomit, and force it to look in the mirror') or as shocking, as vertiginous as the way that the unforgiving, encrypted, hyper-erudite indictments of 'Of Walking Abortion' or 'Archives of Pain' veer suddenly into enormous, horrible stadium singalongs. And those lyrics are not what Rock History might lead us to believe, given their context as a pre-(presumed) suicide record. Compared with this, Ian Curtis was a purveyor of portentous platitudes, Kurt Cobain's gripes only occasionally coherent. On the songs that make the record worth bothering with (around two thirds of the album - '4st 7lb', 'Yes', 'Archives', 'Abortion', 'Faster', 'Die in the Summertime', 'Mausoleum') this is emphatically not a 'break up album' or a Gram Parsons or Neil Young smack-and-depression angst record. The lyrical strategy is far weirder - a sort of conflating of horrors, where lyrics survey everything from Americanism and the grotesquerie of Malcolm X branded trainers to anorexia nervosa to prostitution as exemplary capitalist transaction, to the public executions of dictators, an almost straight advocacy of capital punishment in the name of revolutionary violence, to the capacity for pain and illness of the human body itself - frequently montaged together in the same line. The title itself is a stroke of minor genius - inspired by the fact that the book can be found in every hotel room in the world. 

...humanity recovered, glittering etiquette'

The Holy Bible's texts were a stunning leap from the sloganeering and self-pity of their first two albums, and if Edwards had at this point a contemporary as a lyricist, it was the Scott Walker of Nite Flights, Tilt and The Drift. Both lyricists flagrantly ignored Adorno's counsel (with reference to Schoenberg's Survivor from Warsaw) that to attempt to poeticise these horrors always restores the horror to aesthetic contemplation, no matter how unpleasant or dissonant that contemplation. Scott Walker's response to this is at least to create a musical edifice forbidding enough to discourage easy consumption, something which really isn't replicated by James Dean Bradfield's overdriven and flanged guitars, but the thematic and methodological similarity is clear. A Walker lyric like 'The Cockfighter' or 'Clara' is remarkably similar in its panoply of voices, its mingling of description and accusation, its unforgiving lingering on the recent history we'd rather forget, to 'Mausoleum' or 'Of Walking Abortion', albeit with the sophistication you'd expect from it being written by a significantly older and more guarded writer. The Manics' general tawdriness is one of the reasons why this is seldom noticed. Listening (or rather, reading) the new record is a reminder of what a strange and gifted writer (and sleeve designer, and propagandist) they lost, as well as a reminder that he was to an extent stuck in a band nowhere near as interesting as he was. Even in the handful of moments where Nicky Wire's lyrics approach some sort of greatness ('This is Yesterday', 'A Design for Life'), they're comparitively trite and over-direct. The lyrics on Journal for Plague Lovers, however, are after the initial blast, a very odd affair indeed, suggesting that the album not made after The Holy Bible, even with the more textually brutal tracks recorded in 1995-6 such as 'Judge Yrself' or 'Small Black Flowers that Grow in the Sky', would have been a step back from confrontation into an intriguingly hermetic wordplay.

I would prefer no choice - one bread, one milk, one food that's all

Most reviews have noted, rather incredulously, how funny, how relatively light Journal for Plague Lovers is. Actually there's an extremely mordant wit in 'Yes' or 'Faster' which is usually missed, but in 'Jackie Collins Existential Question Time' (oh yes) or 'Me and Stephen Hawking', Edwards adds to his montages - Mark E Smith-style - lines from working men's club comedy routines, confessions of illness and physical inadequacy that are more rueful than wracked, with JDB's settings of Pixies-ish puckish punk-pop an apt, if inadequate approximation of the lyrical curios. 'Me and Stephen Hawking' in particular is a bizarre farce on biotechnology and factory farming, in its deeply peculiar way one of the best things Edwards ever wrote. There are two tracks of straightforward Holy Bible horror: 'She Bathed Herself in a Bath of Bleach', a grand guignol lyric exhibiting a familiar horror of physical intimacy and dependency, rather unfortunately translated into a risible Nirvana pastiche; and 'All is Vanity', where the group manage to almost conjure up a return to The Holy Bible's preposterous balancing act, with guitar solos and big choruses aligning with a wilfully blank text where selfhood and desire are supposedly effaced by hair dye and an ersatz asceticism. Sadly, some of Journal is as lyrically unimpressive as it is musically - 'Doors Closing Slowly' and 'This Joke Sport Severed' are mere self-pity, turned into mawkish balladry; 'Pretension/Repulsion' comes across as unfinished rather than suggestive, while brilliant sketches of chemical adjustment and bodily transformation like 'Facing Page: Top Left' or 'Virginia State Epileptic Colony' are finished in the form of drab indie rock. The voices inbetween, one of the more ill-advised attempts at Holy Bible emulation, are almost entirely forgettable, bar the Marlon Brando monologues excerpted on the sentimental but nonetheless rather thrilling farrago of 'Marlon J.D'. It ends with what is the nearest the record gets to Richeyspoitation; 'William's Last Words', a text resembling a suicide note sung tremulously and, frankly, very affectingly by Nicky Wire, followed by a 'hidden track': 'Bag Lady', whose first line is 'I am not dead'. This is merely macabre, but it marks a very good point for the group to finally stop. After all their betrayals, their endless lumpen retreads, the Manics have finally written a decent epitaph for themselves, a point where they could quit with some dignity. Needless to say, they're currently recording a new album.

a truth that washes, that learned how to spell

Obviously, though, I did not come to this record expecting an exciting aural experience. Equally obviously, I would rather be listening to Rustie or something equally bright, enjoyable and pointless, but there is no way I will ever give so much of a damn. When popular music starts to be all about the music, we're dealing with a significantly less interesting art form. Journal for Plague Lovers is an awful mess, not something I suspect I'll listen to much (while The Holy Bible gets intensely revisited once every year or so, usually with attendant feeling of mild embarrassment at what my friends might say mingled with surprise at how good it is) but I've thought about it more than I have hardly any other record made in the last few years. I concur almost entirely with Robin Carmody when he writes: 'more than ever, the Manics - with the Smiths, Britain's greatest anti-pop pop group - stand out as the last of a line: born as they were into the last generation raised on and defined by "classic" British socialism, they were the last generation to even be aware of the concepts and contexts that defined everything they did'. It was inspired of Jeremy Deller to call the exhibition he curated on the MSP The Uses of Literacy, as these texts, these ill-advised records, are the perfect corrective to Richard Hoggart's disdain for the 'sex in shiny packets' promised by popular music. A young man from one of those close-knit communities hymned in Hoggart's (still fascinating, still deeply problematic) book, using pop music as a vehicle for a form of writing more associated with High Modernism - but most importantly, using that music in its most base and generic form, Americanised big rock, as a means of putting that across. It failed, it's contradictory, it's in appalling taste - but it was something unique and valuable that could only ever have been achieved in this art form. It'll be a tragedy if nothing as ridiculous and brilliant ever happens in it again.