1) Slash 'n' Burn; 2) Nat West - Barclays - Midlands - Lloyds; 3) Born to End; 4) Motorcycle Emptiness; 5) You Love Us; 6) Love's Sweet Exile; 7) Little Baby Nothing; 8) Repeat (Stars and Stripes); 9) Tennessee; 10) Another Invented Disease; 11) Stay Beautiful; 12) So Dead; 13) Repeat (UK); 14) Spectators of Suicide; 15) Damn Dog; 16) Crucifix Kiss; 17) Methadone Pretty, 18) Condemned to Rock 'n' Roll
An over the top mess of eyeliner, spray paint and hard rock riffs. But what fun it is.
Key tracks: "Slash 'n' Burn", "Motorcycle Emptiness", "Stay Beautiful"
The goal was to sell sixteen million copies and then break up in a blaze of fire. The cover art was meant to be a photo of the infamous Piss Christ art exhibition and when that failed, the band wanted the packaging to be made out of sand paper so the record would destroy the albums you placed next to it on the shelf. Each song comes with its own quote in the liner notes, from Sylvia Plath to Chuck D, in a wild mix of reading list braggadocio. Manic Street Preachers were going to bring down everything you held dear and take their place as your object of worship whether you wanted to or not - the only love song they had written blatantly stated "you love us", and that wasn't a request.
In reality though, Manic Street Preachers were four young men from Wales with more guts than skill. The supposed rhythm guitarist couldn't even play his instrument, but it's okay because the lead guitarist had more skill than everyone else in the band combined - and the drummer didn't play on the album because he got so obsessed with getting the slickest possible drum sound that the final product is all MIDI programming. They intended their debut album to be too big to ignore, so it was intentionally stuffed to its brims to create something monolithic. Behind the self-built hype machine, you had four nobodies testing just how much bravado they could get away with while having a giggle antagonising every member of the press they came across.
Generation Terrorists certainly was an entrance to remember. Its mixture of 80s hard rock guitars, punk rock power and snappy pop hooks was already out of place and somewhat outdated by the early 90s, but the band had such belief in it you'd be forgiven for thinking they had come up with the sound all on their own. The lyrics are frequently more preoccupied with how many literal references and dictionary deep cuts could be crammed into them, syllable counts or coherency be damned, while the politics the band proudly held up and front were tailored into snappy, attention-grabbing pull quotes. It is, politely put, a mess of an album. But it's a beautiful mess, and the band openly embraced and identified with that very notion - "we're a mess of eyeliner and spray paint"; "we won't die of devotion / understand we can never belong"; "rock and roll is our epiphany / culture, alienation, boredom and despair". When they weren't holding up a finger at the world, they were proudly in love with their own disillusionment and lack of belonging.
There was a chance the band could have realised their lofty ambitions - there is a classic record's worth of material within Generation Terrorists. A lion's share of the credit goes to James Dean Bradfield: Nicky Wire and Richey Edwards may have been the face of the band and in charge of the high-level concepts and themes, but Bradfield carries them. He was a little ridiculous himself and fully in cahoots with Wire and Edwards' plans, but he had the most musical talent out of the lot. He was obviously wearing his Guns 'n' Roses fan club badge on his sleeve and frequently indulges in over-the-top shredding solos; culminating in "Condemned to Rock 'n' Roll", the wonderfully pompous closer of the already-pompous album, which is basically Bradfield showing off his guitar chops (both original and clear rip-offs) for several minutes and it's really hard not to love the sheer audacity of it. But he was already a strong frontman with vocal chops powerful enough to inject real passion and conviction into the shtick his band is pulling, and more importantly his actual songwriting is already well beyond his years here. The actual meat of Generation Terrorists is in riff-laden, glammed-up hair metal/punk rock hybrids and while ludicrous and over the top (thus perfectly befitting their image at the time), Bradfield hits a bullseye chorus after chorus, blasts a signature earworm riff for nearly every tune and has the perfect melodic vocal delivery to any of Wire and Edwards' shout-along lines. "Slash 'n' Burn", "You Love Us" (beefed up here compared to the quirkier early version with its singalong ending replaced by more solos), "Born to End", "Stay Beautiful", "Love's Sweet Exile", "Another Invented Disease", "Methadone Pretty"... that's a run of songs that could constitute for one band's hit singles collection on its own, and only some of those make up Manics'. But those strikes just keep on coming, and each one is a born and bred anthem of pure rock and roll power, performed with the zeal of furious young men wanting to rule the world.
Bradfield's talent also provides the band with the capability to stretch their wings beyond what you would expect, snd scattered throughout Generation Terrorists' running length are flashes of ideas beyond the initial scope. "Little Baby Nothing" continues the love affair with 80s cheese the album is generally characterised by but turns the direction towards honest rock power anthems, and it's utterly marvellous in it because somehow there's still actual sincerity in there: in particular its finale, with Bradfield and guest star Traci Lords (they couldn't get Kylie Minogue like they wanted so their next choice was... a porn star, in true early Manics fashion) raising their voices for their final lines as the fireworks go off behind them is the kind of genuine rock and roll dreams coming true that Meat Loaf could only yearn for. Moving further beyond the established ruleset, the early pre-album b-side "Spectators of Suicide" is transformed from a traditional rock slowburner into an atypically atmospheric dreamscape - there's a surprising ache to its ambience and after already a full album's worth of high intense energy, it's a needed break, even if it loses a little of the original version's gravitas. The undeniable standout is "Motorcycle Emptiness" in all its fame and glory, as stunning as it is baffling: sandwiched between these glammed-up rock takes is a majestic, carefully arranged skyscraper of an anthem that predicted the late 90s Britrock sound to a T, and which really reveals that there's so much more depth to this ramshackle group than the first glance would show. It's a song that could have appeared in any later Manics album and still sound incredible, with its career-defining signature riff and awe-inspiring middle eight, but because where it's placed it sounds even more phenomenal. It's a once in a lifetime kind of song for a band, and here they're just wheeling it out like it's an accidental fluke.
But then there's the rest, and Generation Terrorists' one genuine issue is the inarguable fact that in the process of wanting to make the album bigger, the band threw in a whole load of material that never had an actual place on the record. Some of it is literal, genuine filler that no one would have given a second thought to a minute after recording it: "Damn Dog" is a short cover of an obscure in-universe film song which screams throwaway in concept alone let alone execution, and the Stars and Stripes version of "Repeat" is an aimless remix that tries to inject some vaguely US-styled big-budget beats into a song that isn't particularly interesting even in its original, monarchy-cursing punk take (here labeled as "Repeat (UK)", another three-minute should-be cast-off). While Bradfield's knack for melody is enough to insert at least one memorable hook or another into even the weaker songs, it's still not enough to warrant the need to include the likes of "Tennessee", an early demo that maybe didn't need a reappearance, or "Crucifix Kiss" which is the winner of the album's most uninspired song award - and it really is just dull, in the kind of rare way where nothing of interest registers between going in from one ear and out the other.
The duds are lucky to be in such a good company because they are carried across the finish line by their stronger comrades, but they do slog things down and even when they grow on you, it's akin to developing a tolerance for them for the rest of the album's sake while suppressing the reflex to hit the skip button. Key part of that is the overwhelming charisma of the whole record. The band never genuinely believed they were making an all-time immortal record, but they are absolutely 100% in on their own game, which cuts through the album's silliness, bloat and poor production. The tunes are tailor-made for pogoing and air guitaring, the band's strong personality is constantly present and as clumsy as its lyrics often are, they are perfect soundbites to shout along to music like this. So while the filler is not forgiven, the album's too much fun for the weaker tracks to do too much damage, with only "Repeat (Stars and Stripes)" effectively pausing the album to a halt simply because of the jarring style change. The rest you can deal with, even if you give them a judging side-eye.
If that sounds like too much familiarity required to brush off the flaws then that's fine, because these days Generation Terrorists is largely a fans-only affair. It's hard to imagine someone new coming across this in this day and age and get excited about it, and it certainly doesn't offer anything for people who seek out more things akin to the band's big albums. But for the established fans, it's a way of hearing their favourites operating at the peak of their early day nonsense and that's a valid thing to get your kicks out of. There are great songs but there's also a sufficient amount of clunkiness that's jarring to anyone at first listen and it only becomes endearing once you get to grips with the band's history and the context behind the record, like jumping into a prequel without being familiar with the actual core of the franchise first. Once you find yourself beyond that border though, the album becomes a joyful relic of the past in a way that's clearly biased, but unashamedly so. Of any Manics album this is the one that's grown on me the most over the years because the biggest gap stylistically in their catalogue is between this and everything else and it took some time to adjust; but it while may not be the kind of immortalisation they sought out, the charm inherent in Generation Terrorists is still intact and working after all this time.
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