| Manic Street Preachers Everything Must Go
Q - Disappearing acts - whether stress-related or through sheer ego-driven arseyness - are fairly common in rock, but the vanishing of Richey James on February 1, 1995 was without precedent. Faced with a potential no-win situation where a subsequent split would possibly have been criticised as defeatist (never a Manic Street Preachers' trait), the three existing - or indeed surviving - Manic Street Preachers made a brave decision to carry on as a functioning group. The fact that the resulting record has little in common with the agitated punk of Holy Bible might have something to do with their choice of producer (Mike Hedges, '80s veteran of albums by The Cure and Siouxsie & The Banshees), but equally might be reasoned as the group deciding that a repeated display of such angst would somehow seem inappropriate. In the sense that Richey James's contribution was primarily in his lyrical collaboration with bass player Nicky Wire, his presence on Everything Must Go is as strong as perhaps it ever was (the majority of his guitar parts having always been performed by singer and six-string virtuoso James Dean Bradfield), with three lyrics written before his disappearance featured here, and another two (the opening Elvis Impersonator: Blackpool Pier and The Girl Who Wanted To Be God) subsequently completed by Nicky Wire. Though it's clearly tempting to pick through these for clues, it is to the band's credit that their musical treatments often belie the songs' various subject matters, with Removeables' Cobain-like messages of misery and personal disgust matched to a simple, almost jaunty, '60s beat group skip. Musically, the group have returned to and, indeed, improved upon the epic pop-rock of Gold Against The Soul, this time frequently topping it with lush strings and touches of celestial harp. Even when stripped bare of distorted guitars and accompanied by the bleak imagery of Richey James's Small Black Flowers That Grow In The Sky, it proves stunningly effective. Twelve tracks, then, of emotionally driven commercial rock is what we're left with, and surely that's enough. The only message for the devoted comes from the reverb-laden, Phil Spector-inspired title track, where the rousing chorus vocal finds James Dean Bradfield singing And we hope you can forgive us/But everything must go. In the light of everything, who could possibly bear a grudge? 4 stars out of five |
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