In 2008, Richey Edwards' official status was changed from "Missing" to "Presumed Dead" at the request of his family. His fate has been a mystery since February 1, 1995, when he left the Embassy Hotel in London. His car was found on Valentine's Day near a notorious suicide spot, but he left no other physical traces. What he did leave behind was his band, the Manic Street Preachers, who continued as a trio in his absence with his family's blessing. Sean Moore, Nicky Wire, and James Dean Bradfield have never quite left him behind-- his lyrics appeared on a few songs on Everything Must Go, their first album without him, and they've kept aside a share of royalties on the increasingly remote chance Edwards will return some day.
A few weeks prior to his disappearance, Edwards gave Wire a folder filled with lyrics and poetry. It had a picture of Bugs Bunny on the cover, with the word "opulence" scrawled across it. For their ninth album, the band has turned to this folder for one last harrowing look into the mind of their absent friend. Edwards' lyrics, slightly edited by Wire, feature on every song, and the album as a whole completes something of a return to form begun on 2007's Send Away the Tigers. The band was a bit rudderless after 1998's This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours, and Tigers seemed a conscious attempt to recapture a sense of direction-- the backward "r"s in the album art intentionally harked back to the band's 1994 masterpiece The Holy Bible. Here, the throwback to their peak is even more pronounced: The album art is a painting by Holy Bible artist Jenny Saville (bizarrely censored by some British grocery chains), the lyrics are by Edwards, and the music, recorded by Steve Albini, is nasty and tangled, and they've even nodded to The Holy Bible's use of interstitial sound clips from news broadcasts and movies.
From any other band, such a precise return to ground already covered might seem cynical, but these guys have never been anything but honest, and there seems to be a genuine desire not to let their deceased colleague's words go to waste. "Peeled Apples" opens the album with a colossal kick to the head as a queasy bassline is joined by pounding drums and sandpaper guitar to back Bradfield's righteous shout. He's always had a talent for torturing the words Edwards and Wire provided him into durable melodies, and it's no different here. This song, "Marlon J.D." and the hidden track, "Bag Lady", are musically the most hard-hitting things this band has done since 1994. "Marlon" opens with the walloping couplet, "He stood like a statue/ As he was beaten across the face," and runs through an absurdly catchy verse from there.
It's not all bone-crushing hard rock, though. The title track has a clear-eyed rock jangle to pair with its heavy crunch, and "Facing Page: Top Left" is as gentle and quiet as the Manics get, bathing its verses about the beauty regime in acoustic guitar and a splattering of piano. "Doors Closing Slowly" rather awkwardly ends with a passage from The Virgin Suicides, one of a few cracks in the album's armor. The biggest is "William's Last Words", sung by Nicky Wire instead of Bradfield, as if to remind us why Bradfield is the band's lead singer. At just over four minutes, it's by far the album's longest song, and also its least memorable by any musical measure, though I imagine that, for the band, working on that one was emotional because of its lyrics, which essentially read like a goodbye to the band from Edwards.
Even if it were the desperate or cynical move some people have claimed it is, there's no denying that purging Edwards' old lyric folder has helped the band create its best album in a decade. Quite simply, they haven't sounded so focused or so purposeful in a long, long time, and they are at their best with a sense of purpose underpinning their music. The charge that it sounds like The Holy Bible's little brother is accurate, but I'd argue that this isn't a bad thing at all, and I hope they find a way to build on the momentum they've created here. The little brother of Everything Must Go would be welcome, too.
