Manic Street Preachers | The Ultra Vivid Lament (original) (raw)

Resignation and revolution, despair and defiance. For the Manics, the friction between these extremes has long lit the spark that propels them. Despite the defeatism in its title, 2018’s Resistance Is Futile drew fuel from its arthouse passions and lunging melodic outreach. Three tough years of family losses, Covid, Tory failures, middle age and more later, their 14th album rakes over the wreckage and emerges as a generous, deeply humane mission statement: it’s an album of profound melancholy, of course, but also one lit up with heroic, big-pop colour. Ultra-vivid indeed.

While the world offers few reasons for uplift right now, the Manics tap into one sure resource for galvanising returns: a great record collection. Even by Nicky Wire’s crate-digging standards, their track-by-track guide for the album brims with artful and populist reference points. The Clash, Lodger-era David Bowie, the Bunnymen, Simple Minds and more leap out among audible points of influence. Clearer still, James Dean Bradfield’s decision to write a lot of the songs on piano also brings pronounced echoes of Swedish pop juggernauts ABBA to the fore.

Yet even at their most referential, the Manics cannot help but be themselves. That abiding constancy becomes an increasingly sturdy source of potency the more the album unfolds. Still Snowing In Sapporo invokes Talk Talk and ABBA yet visits the sorrowed lineage of Rewind The Film or Distant Colours, with its translucent reflections on the fade of memories. A bit Bowie, a bit Bunnymen, Orwellian is also inescapably, unrepentantly the Manics, from its title to the way it wrings anthemic returns from apocalyptic lyrical imagery.

Inspired by Welsh artists Gwen and Augustus John, The Secret He Had Missed is slighter, its vocal trade-offs between Bradfield and Sunflower Bean’s Julia Cumming bringing to mind Resistance…’s similarly under-powered Vivian. Keener reflections on splintered times kick in with Quest For Ancient Colour’s sweeping song of summery reminiscence, where youthful fight struggles with middle age: from there to despair.

Don’t Let The Night Divide Us is a briskly melodic bid to tease hope from tragedy’s ashes, hinged on a call to wrest power from “those boys from Eton”. An exultant standout, Complicated Illusions pinpoints the extent to which the Manics’ compulsions define them, with Nicky Wire’s lyrics at their most intricate and exposed. “And in the rhythm of your voice/I find space to rejoice,” sings Bradfield, buoyed by an ecstatic melody that lands like waves crashing on a battered shore.

No matter how bleak the outlook, reasons to rejoice in the Manics’ sustained energies mount. In its sonic colour, …Lament is as rich an album as any they have made, from the luminescent guitars of achingly serene and stoical “lament for now” Diapause to the sky-scraping vocal interlude of the galloping, R.E.M.-echoing Into The Waves Of Love. On Blank Diary Entry, Mark Lanegan duets beautifully with Bradfield, investing lyrics about “a garden full of locusts” with the weight only the former Screaming Trees frontman can bring.

Despite its seemingly shut-off title, Happy Bored Alone is unapologetically anthemic. To close, Afterending sets snapshots of modern turmoil and protest alongside an ABBA-esque “la la la-la-la” and a huge chorus. “Sail into the abyss with me,” sings Bradfield, making the prospect sound inviting. Even if the Manics will never candy-coat their struggles, they illuminate them with unflinching acuity here. If to the abyss we must go, who better to pick as co-travellers than the Manics at full thrust?

Q+A

Manics bassist Nicky Wire on ABBA, ageing and the “amazing” Mr Lanegan…

The references to other bands in the track-by-track notes are particularly expansive. It’s a very generous album…
It is a very generous album, that’s a good description. The musical framework was pretty much 1974-1985, Waterloo to Bring On The Dancing Horses. We wanted the record to sound like a future that never arrived.

James wrote a lot on piano, Was it about wanting to get away from guitars a little or about tuning into the main influences for the album?
It was a natural flow – I think he was just stretching himself musically but we fell in love with the songs immediately. The ABBA influence was us paying tribute to our parents’ record collections. Motorcycle Emptiness has a huge ABBA influence, Dancing Queen in particular. We wanted to capture that glacial, serene melancholy – to show pop music could have depth and sadness, not the empty digital hysteria we consume now.

Your albums often wrestle with the tug of defeatism. Did the extremities of our times drive you to try and tap into your reserves of optimism?
It’s about dealing with harsh realities and almost embracing them. We’ve all hit 52 now and life is so distant to what it was like 10 years ago. There is a constant sense of loss and decline – all you can do is try and manage it gracefully. Optimism may be a bit strong but there is a sense of accepting the bewildering car crash of existence.

Is that the big challenge now, how to be truthful to the inevitable truth of ageing while remaining engaged?
Being engaged or relevant has become increasingly difficult – the cruelty of time seems to have been amplified in the last 18 months. Ageing and its consequences haunt my thoughts and lyrics. The death of my parents hangs over me all the time.

How did the Lanegan duet come about?
James and Sean are big fans, and I admire his words. The song seemed a perfect fit. James met him at a tribute concert for Nico and we’d toured with Screaming Trees way back, with Oasis. Richey loved the track Dollar Bill, so it all felt right and Mark was amazing. He fills the track with a broken, fragile humanity, so rich and vivid.

Faith is a keynote of Complicated Illusions… what continues to fuel the Manics’ faith?
Complicated Illusions is a very heavy lyric dealing with Derrida, existentialism and the meaning and power of words. The faith element refers to the band itself and the aesthetics that have given us truth but now seem fragmented and redundant. When people ask me for advice or guidance in terms of being in a band, I say I have none – everything we believed in that formed us is just not applicable anymore and probably never will be. As Jill Lepore says in the brilliant book If Then, about the start of the internet, “What matters is what remains, endures and cures.”
As told to Kevin Harley

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