1) Sleepflower; 2) From Despair to Where; 3) La Tristesse Durera (Scream to a Sigh); 4) Yourself; 5) Life Becoming a Landslide; 6) Drug Drug Druggy; 7) Roses in the Hospital; 8) Nostalgic Pushead; 9) Symphony of Tourette; 10) Gold Against the Soul
Concise, determined and muscular - the showcase for a band who want to be taken seriously, even if there's a coin flip element to whether they land an arena classic or an eccentric hard rock cut.
Key tracks: "Sleepflower", "From Despair to Where", "La Tristesse Durera (Scream to a Sigh)"
The great Manics tradition of each album being a reaction to the last starts here, right from their second album. Generation Terrorists was the kind of record you could only pull off once successfully, especially after the band's loud brags about selling millions of copies of it and splitting immediately, and so Gold Against the Soul represented a quick rebirth after the band had barely spent time in their initial incarnation, going against the excess and rowdiness of Generation Terrorists. It's a solid ten songs instead of sprawling 18, the make-up and glam are gone and everyone's wearing their best dour rock and roll wear, and the attention-craving political one-liners have been replaced by a more personal, thoughtful lyrical touch - and Moore is playing real drums now. The playtime was over and the Manics wanted to show they were a band worth taking seriously.
For that, the band stepped up a notch, each in their own way. Wire and Edwards' lyrics tackle a wider range of subjects and they start showing their actual talents here, with a finer attention towards the lyrical narratives as a whole rather than just a string of snappy pull quotes. The musical arrangements are more detailed and the production has been polished, and the future Manics staple of a string section accompaniment appearing in a select handful of songs. Above all, it rocks. Gold Against the Soul features a more muscular form of Manics, all hard riffs and extended guitar riffs, with James Dean Bradfield bellowing and steamrolling through the lyrics he's been handed. The band have never been shy about being comfortable with the idea of performing to masses of people in giant stages, and Gold Against the Soul goes all-in in its arena ambitions, and in the process stars showing off far more of the later Manics' DNA in its songs than its predecessor did. It's a little like a talent showcase for the band's capabilities that only occasionally showed up on Generation Terrorists, and much of the album is coloured by the Manics' desire to show that there's more to them than glitter, spray paint and headline-hogging antics. The thing is, sometimes you can dial all that up a little too much and sometimes they can go so against the grain of their previous album that the desire to show change ends up coming across a little cartoonish in its own way.
So, Gold Against the Soul ends up being a little split-natured. For one half of the album it's a blueprint for what's to come for the remainder of the band's 1990s and is the type of stadium rock and roll celebration that history has shown comes the most naturally for them, and all the album's most famous songs come from that vein. But then, for the other half of the album, the band use that same bag of tricks for off-kilter songs where the band fire off in unexpected directions amidst their growing pains. On one hand you have songs like e.g. "From Despair to Where" and "La Tristesse Durera", both which effectively introduce all the band's signature elements together into a singular unit for the first time and sound timeless and classy as a result. But there's a sizable difference between them and the more atypical cuts like the sarcastic hard rock theatre of "Nostalgic Pushead" and the very, very po-faced and aggressive "Symphony of Tourette" and "Yourself", which sound like the glam rocker of the debut album got hit by the early 90s wave of transatlantic alternative rock angst. As compositions go, the latter category are largely very solid, apart from the rather one-dimensional "Drug Drug Druggy" which chugs along pleasantly but shoots itself in the foot with its clunky chorus (the best thing about is the nonsensical alphabet lesson that closes the song). In particular "Nostalgic Pushead" is simply too entertaining not to love as the comedically theatrical side of Manics gets one of its rare appearances, and James sounds like he's having a ball channeling the coke-driven spirit of a washed-out rock superstar. But then, contrast it with the orchestrally accentuated Britrock swells of e.g. "From Despair to Where" and it's like listening to same band but across two different timelines.
While the aloof side of the album is great in its own way ("Yourself" and "Symphony of Tourette" may be unintentionally silly but they are catchy as anything), the real glory does lie in its singles run - this is one of the few instances where all four of the album's singles were the absolutely correct choices and each of them is a major or minor classic in the band's catalogue. The aforementioned "From Despair to Where" and "La Tristesse Durera" are the album's golden children, the latter especially so: the bass-driven build-up with James' falsetto effectively rearing its head leads way into a simply sublime anthem with one of Bradfield's signature riffs and a triumphantly brilliant climax (and the simple moment where the song bursts into its full volume after its first chorus has never lost its shine). The gloriously strolling "Roses in the Hospital" injects a bittersweet ray of sunshine into the album with its bouncy arrangement and jovial surface mood (particularly with James' ad-libbing towards its end), but its lyrics start foreshadowing the more intense self-reflection the band would go to take on the next album. Finally, "Life Becoming a Landslide" puts together the album's gentler and rawer sides as it alternates between its head-banger riffs and torchlight anthem choruses. All four songs are showcases for a band who have consciously and intentionally taken great stride in leveling up and are now showing their work, and the boxes that Generation Terrorists' "Motorcycle Emptiness" nodded at are now starting to get ticked full-time.
Special mention also goes to the album's bookends, which are the closest the album gets to a bridge between its zig-zagging nature. "Sleepflower" is a beast of a song and a somewhat of a grown-up version of the band's prior intentionally over-the-top nature. It's clear there was a want to make an explosive opener to show what's changed right from the get-go and they decided to go all-in with it: the extended breakdown that goes from moody church bells to a dueling guitar solo across a couple of minutes of runtime is one of the most deliriously powerful musical histrionics this band has ever done. But, they still stuff a really good song around those theatrics and it's one of Manics' straightforwardly strongest honest rock anthems. Meanwhile the closing title track covers itself in various filters and layers like its fistpump-ready hooks are playing hide and seek: but beneath those effects it has real fire and lightning in its gut, with some of James' best pure guitar riffage intermingling with genuine political rage in its lyrics, which are a long mile away from the sloganeering nature of the debut. The soaring chorus is both angry and liberated, James spitting out lines like venom while acknowledging that musically, this is where the jubilant fireworks will go off.
In terms of pure rock powerhouse performance, Gold Against the Soul is one of Manics' strongest - so it's perhaps surprising that despite its iconic singles, it has a somewhat muted reception among the general populace and the majority of fans (and the band but that's like 80% of their discography for them). But look at it from another angle: it's perhaps equally surprising that you could have those four readily-formed hit singles here when so much of the album feels like it's going towards a different direction. It's not a cohesive record at all - but it is consistent. Generation Terrorists already proved that even when they were at their prime messiness, the band could already write a heck of a song despite of it. With Gold Against the Soul, there are so many genuine leaps forward in the overall ideas and performance that most everything here is genuinely very good, and it doesn't have to rely on pure charisma now and then like its predecessor did. Or to put it differently, this is one occasion where the band were true to their word: they wanted to be taken seriously and sure enough, this is the album where they became a serious band with real ambitions. It results in a genuinely great record, even if occasionally unfocused.
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