Manic Street Preachers
This Is My Truth, Tell Me Yours
1998

genre: soft-rock, pop-rock
1. The Everlasting - 6:08
2. If You Tolerate This, Your Children Will Be Next - 4:50
3. You Stole the Sun From My Heart - 4:20
4. Ready For Drowning - 4:32
5. Tsunami - 3:51
6. My Little Empire - 4:09
7. I'm Not Working - 5:51
8. You're Tender and You're Tired - 4:37
9. Born a Girl - 4:12
10. Be Natural - 5:12
11. Black Dog On My Shoulder - 4:48
12. Nobody Loved You - 4:44
13. S.Y.M.M. - 5:57

I used to be a huge fan of these guys, and by used to I mean I was around the time Lifeblood came out. I loved that album, how abrasive it was in its own way and the like, and as such the Manics were definitely among the bands I respected the most when I first started buying a whole lotta CDs, and thus listening to a lot more music than your average Joe would. At that point (around 2003, 2004 or something similar), I was of course a huge Lifeblood acolyte, bought and played my copy of their controversial best of compilation Forever Delayed to death, and...well, ranked in descending order of preference are the albums I had at the time;

The Holy Bible > Everything Must Go > Lifeblood >>> Generation Terrorists > Gold Against the Soul >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Know Your Enemy

So, here I am using the phrase 'used to' more than an enraged Star Wars fanboy who's just seen the prequels for the first time. Why? Something quite simple yet earth-shatteringly significant happend - in 2007, Send Away the Tigers came out and, perhaps pivotally, that god-awful song about your love alone not being enough got unleashed with it. Besides the title track, I just hated that album beyond belief. All the steps forward that the Manics made with Lifeblood were completely retraced and replaced with a patronising album of rock anthems and ballads. I had (and still have) officially lost almost all respect I once had for the Bradfield/Wire/Moore trio, to the point that barring the odd, nostalgic re-run of the top 3 on that list I provided above, I'm pretty much totally indifferent to them. I haven't even bothered getting the two albums they've released since but, judging by the songs I've heard on the radio or youtube, Journal For Plague Lovers sounds like an improvement on Send Away the Tigers, but still hardly worth the effort. Postcards From a Young Man on the other hand sounds like total and utter shit, and is noteworthy in that it achieved the unimaginable feat of being a Manics album I hate more than Send Away the Tigers. To say that I couldn't care less about their next album-in-the-making, 70 Songs Of Hatred and Failure, would be an understatement of possibly libellous proportions.

Anyway, enough talk about the discography. This is, after all, meant to be an album review. As the eagle-eyed among you may have noticed about the above list, one album is missing from it. This one! This is not only because ranking it there would render the rest of this little note quite, quite pointless, but also because I never had the album during the years between Lifeblood and Send Away the Tigers. The reason is simple and a wee bit bland, that being that I just didn't get round to buying it all those years ago. Basically, if you're my age and older, you'll remember a time before building up a music collection basically became a form of trainspotting when you bought an album because it had some kind of emotional weight invested in it for you, and because you had genuine expectations from it other than to add to your artist count on LastFM. Beyond the scabby, malware-ridden p2p networks, there was practically no other way to get hold of this stuff other than to buy it, really. Not that I'm complaining or anything - the way the world of music-collecting is now, it saves me money that I can now spend on booze, hard drugs, hookers and high-stake games of poker. Anyway, what was I on about?...oh yeah, my point is that back in those days if I went about hunting down a discography (as I often did), I'd think the band were something properly special. Often, as in this case, I'd get distracted by something like that Distillers song I'd seen on MTV2 that morning and buy their album instead of plugging the last gap in the Manics' discography here, and I'd just forget about it altogether.

I could probably type up something more entertaining if I tore Send Away the Tigers a new arsehole, got hold of Postcards Of a Young Man as one more reason not to get their next album, or fawning over the Holy Bible or Everything Must Go. Truthfully though, I haven't had this album for so long and, consequently, haven't listened to it an awful lot, so I think now's as good a time as any to give this album a real go. Also, this album has something of a reputation that gets ahead of it. Basically, it's a bit of a curate's egg, inasmuch as it divides listeners right down the middle - you either love it or hate it. One thing's for sure, though, and that's that this signals the point in the Manics' discography where they went off at the pop end. Ok, it's true that the preceding Everything Must Go was the most commercial album they'd released to date, but it also had plenty of the loudness, rock-outs and fire in the belly that their earlier albums before Richey Edwards' disappearance had done. Here is where anything resembling the brasher, punkier Manics sound of yesteryear was completely stripped away in favour of something much softer, more melodic and all-round commercial.

Basically, I remember being about 10 years old when this album came out. I was at a friend's house one day, and I saw that said friend's Mum had a copy of this album. That's the kind of demographic this album was lapped up by (and how! This album sold by the crapload back in the day). Not only have I heard this album being called one of the Manics' worst, and the beginning of the end according to the Richey fans, but I've also seen it hailed as their best by the odd dissenting voice. I'm sure there's some nutjob out there who thinks the Crazy Frog has everything that Bob Dylan didn't, but any album that people call one of their favourites of all time has to be worth at least a bit of my attention.

So how does it hold up? Well, first of all, let me just say that I love this album's title. It just has such a romantic kind of energy to it, and it certainly did what a good album title should do when I first came across it, and that was to make me wonder what the music beneath it must be like. That's the thing with the Manics, isn't it? No matter what they do, they can always come up with great titles for their songs and albums. Maybe it's just me

Anyway, while we're on the subject of judging this book by its cover, I'll also say that the sleeve art photo is just pure shite. They look like fucking Westlife, or some other rubbish aimed at people's parents or ill-educated kids (when it comes to music).

The music itself though? I've put off talking about it for as long as possible, so I may as well say that I didn't expect much from this album as I came to it, and not much is exactly what I got. Like the grand majority of pop albums, it suffers from having singles which are far, far superior to the rest of the album. The opening trio of songs is all you really need from this album. The Everlasting is an absolutely gorgeous, string-laden ballad, and a show of how great the rest of this album should have been. If You Tolerate This really strikes a chord with me and, apart from being the Manics' biggest hit, is just another really great song. You Stole the Sun From My Heart on the other hand, while the chorus is a tad lame, is by large a wonderfully-memorable, finely-tuned and intricate pop song. Apart from those three, not to mention the above average Tsunami and You're Tender and You're Tired, this album is just so goddamn boring. It's awash in synthesizers and strings, but just does everything that the aforementioned first three songs did right and gets them all completely and totally wrong.

It's very creditable that James, Nicky and Sean really want to move on from the Richey years and the sound connected with them, but it's like they're just making that move way before they were really ready to here. This album could've done with either being released as an EP, or just being combined with the better moments from Know Your Enemy to make an infinitely better album. As such, if you've been thinking about getting hold of this, you should probably give it a go for yourself, as it does leave a wildly different make on people who listen to it. As for me, I'm somewhere near the middle...

Orpheus