MANIC STREET PREACHERS

FUTUROLOGY

Columbia

****



THEY STAND APART, the Manics. They always did. They emerged at the turn of the 1990s into a UK alternative scene where they found neither allies nor analogues. Rave-influenced, baggy-jeaned, druggy, loved-up indie rock was swaggering into the charts. The Manics kicked their own way in with a variation on punk that alienated even the other punk revivalists of the moment - alienation being what they felt, and what they did. They had an unabashed devotion to soft metal and arena rock. They embraced the tawdriest excesses of American mass culture - abhorrent, then as now, to the parochial British indie worldview, which reacted to their admiration for Guns N’ Roses as if in an H.M. Bateman cartoon. Yet they never compromised the integrity of their fierce and confrontational erudition.

Four years on, when Britpop made a kind of chortling, reactionary hedonism almost compulsory, the Manics released The Holy Bible: a dark, fearsome, nihilistic work acclaimed among their first wave of fans as their masterpiece. Two years after that, following the disappearance of conceptual mastermind Richey Edwards, they gained a new audience with Everything Must Go, and its subversive stadium anthems. “Libraries gave us power,” sang James Dean Bradfield, the band’s musical engine. It was a valediction to the broad working-class intellectualism those now vanishing libraries fuelled.

The Manics represent what looks like a final flowering both of that spirit, and of an indie sub-culture wherein a band might define its fans’ sense of identity.

It’s been less than a year since their last album, Rewind The Film - stripped down and by their standards low-key, at least sonically speaking, although typically declamatory. They recorded it in part at Berlin’s Hansa, one of those recording studios which imposes its aura on visiting bands. Most famous for David Bowie’s late Seventies masterpieces, it has also hosted Siouxsie and the Banshees, Iggy Pop, Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds and Depeche Mode.

The experience of recording there has













evidently had an effect. Their twelfth album, Futurology, also made in part at Hansa, positively radiates pop Teutonicism. It echoes both the studio’s celebrated past clients (the instrumental Dreaming A City might be a Pixies tune that morphs into an out-take from Bowie’s Low), and Krautrock’s pulsebeat rhythms. It delves into the post-punk sounds of bands who themselves felt a fascination for distinctly mittel-European forms of Expressionism and Modernism.

In keeping with its predecessor, it expands on the band’s often monochromatic palette by featuring guest vocalists. Green Gartside of Scritti Politti delivers a welcome and characteristically delicate turn on Between the Clock and the Bed, delicacy being one quality. the Manics have tended to lack. Welsh neo-folkie Georgia Ruth, whose own 2013 debut Week of Pines is a lovely thing, lights up the coruscating Divine Youth.

Beyond this, Futurology is a work of notable stylistic range for a band whose records have tended towards the homogenous. It stretches its legs like no Manics album before. You can imagine it swiftly becoming a new favourite both for the eyeliner-and-leopardskin misfits who from the very start found in the Manics the expression of their own outsider instincts, and for the denim casuals who cottoned on after Everything Must Go. The band may not be actively courting fresh ears, as they claimed to be with 2010’s Postcards From A Young Man, but they deserve to find some.

If this all sounds a bit easy-going, be assured Futurology includes the customary bouts of self-laceration - something the Manics now engage in figuratively, rather than, as they did once, literally. The Next Jet To Leave Moscow’s brisk air belies a lyric condemning as hypocrisy the gap between the band’s professed beliefs and their lives as touring rock stars. Although chief lyricist Nicky Wire disclaims the idea, Walk Me To The Bridge cannot help but evoke, in theme and in phrase, the memory of his departed and now legally deceased bandmate, whose car was found near the Severn Bridge in 1995.

You couldn’t have guessed back then that Manic Street Preachers would today seem more radical in spirit than most UK guitar bands unborn at their inception. It doesn’t say much for British indie that this should be so; but it says a great deal about the Manics.











