1) Yes; 2) IfwhiteAmericatoldthetruthitsworldwouldfallapart; 3) Of Walking Abortion; 4) She Is Suffering; 5) Archives of Pain; 6) Revol; 7) 4st 7lb; 8) Mausoleum; 9) Faster; 10) This Is Yesterday; 11) Die in the Summertime; 12) The Intense Humming of Evil; 13) P.C.P.
Confrontational, nihilistic, visceral - Manics unleash their anxiety and Richey Edwards digs deep into the darkest parts of his imagination.
Key tracks: "Archives of Pain", "Faster", "This Is Yesterday"
It's really rather impossible to talk about The Holy Bible, the Manics' third album, without talking about Richey Edwards at the same time. Edwards had never been an important member to the band musically - his guitar playing was rudimentary, non-existent on record and literally silenced on stage - but he drove the band forward thematically through their image-heavy early years, where their manifestos were as important as the music. Edwards was largely in charge of the band's visuals both in artwork and the frequent costume design, he was one of the band's primary spokespeople in front of the press and his idiosyncratic lyrical tone gave the band their own unique voice. While he shared many of these duties 50/50 with bassist Nicky Wire, The Holy Bible saw him take a larger creative control of the process. His mental and physical health began to deteriorate following the tour for Gold Against the Soul, and it spurred him on a wild creative spree. He was churning out lyric after lyric, and they had started to become increasingly cryptic and disturbed, filled with a sense of loathing for the self and everything else.
The Holy Bible by association has become a monument of a pained man lost in his own mind, and the band themselves lionise it as such, as Richey's album. Wire had moved to a new house after getting recently married and with Richey's new direction being so far in his own world, Wire found that he wasn't able to contribute to the lyrics in the same fashion as he had before. This lead to Edwards inadvertently taking direct control of where the band was heading thematically, with Wire merely contributing a few songs and the occasional title. Edwards' lyrics at this point barely functioned as such in form or format, and the material was also significantly darker and increasingly hard to decipher. Some of the new songs were painfully autobiographical even if disguised, most blatantly the anorexia-tackling "4st 7lb". Others were erratic political commentaries and allegories, some of which flippantly addressed the topics of the day while others were abnormally brutal (the band to this day still can't say whether the death-penalty favouring "Archives of Pain" is meant to be serious or sarcastic); though it's worth noting that the most blatant political cut, the obviously targeting "IfwhiteAmerica..." was mostly Wire's work. Heavy traces of deadpan irony and sarcasm lace through most lines, and prevalent throughout is particularly violent and morbid imagery: the opener "Yes" launches right into a narrative of tearing off an underage boy prostitute's genitalia in its first chorus and that's just a prelude for what the rest of the album contains. The words are cold, nihilistic, hopeless and free-form - the stream-of-consciousness journals of a man viewing the world and seeing nothing worth salvaging.
But Edwards is half the story behind The Holy Bible. While the album is undeniably centered around its primary writer, the rest of the band were under creative crisis of their own. The process behind Gold Against the Soul had left an unsavoury taste in the whole band's mouth - too bombastic, too American, too much of big studio production. Shortly after its release the band had also lost a close friend in their manager Philip Hall, who had been a key element of the Manics ever getting a chance in the music world and who had been their guiding mentor. The band were going through a loss of direction and weren't certain how to recover from it, but their label's offers of even flashier studios definitely felt like the wrong step forward. In retaliation the band opted for the opposite, to pare things down and impose limits. The Holy Bible was recorded in a cheap studio with a tightly regimented, intense schedule, in an environment removed from any additional distractions. Absolute focus, no social life, only work - the band worked extended hours from morning until evening, strict and disciplined. The songs were approached methodically, each element and section scrutinised. Every part of the band's existence was centered around and obsessed over the music they were making.
The Holy Bible is a very visceral and instinctual album, but its songs required that kind of scrutiny. The Manics always worked on their music lyrics first, and the words Richey were providing required a new kind of focus and inventiveness from principal songwriters James Dean Bradfield and Sean Moore in order to shape them into songs. The two responded to the challenge by similarly abandoning their former habits and the signature elements they had began to develop on the first two albums - and they went somewhere completely different. From a compositional point of view The Holy Bible is a humongous step askew for the Manics and at times it's borderline chaotic. The songs are full of various C- and D-sections that turn up once or twice and usually mutated in some way. Sometimes the songs suddenly change tract altogether, e.g. the intro to "PCP" is like from a wholly different song to the rest and "4st 7lb" flicks from anxiety-plagued dissonance to a waltz at halfway point. The verses erratically flip through vocal melodies because the structure of the lyrics dictate it so, and Bradfield's vocals are at times as abstract as the lyrics as he abandons all notion of English stress and syllable structure rules and squashes in Richey's lines into bars; the stuttering syllable blender of the pre-choruses of "Mausoleum" is a particularly brilliant example, and a key part of what makes that song hit so hard. If the words are off-kilter, Bradfield made their delivery to match.
The band also responded to the intensity of Edwards lyrics with a musical intensity of their own, so Bradfield's guitars scream and buzzsaw, while Moore's drums storm with military precision. Chaotic band breakdown outros are a regular occurrence, be it the accusatory and potently explicit screaming of "Of Walking Abortion" and "Faster" or the instrumental fury of "Archives of Pain", which corks its menacing intensity with an extended guitar solo that keeps accelerating before it hits the wall. While the words are full of dark thoughts towards everything, the music stays cold, detached and brutal, with mathematical precision in its curves and swerves rather than pathos or affecting melancholy. Rather than brood over everything, the Manics are detached, laying judgement but uncaringly of whether it's actually heard or agreed with - and that just makes songs like the ominously calm and collected "Yes" and the matter-of-fact delivery of "Faster" all the stronger. If there's a prevailing emotion peeking through, it's pure fury. The album is frequently cited as one of the darkest albums of the 1990s but that has always seemed a bit hyperbolic to me: it's vitriolic and grim for sure, but it's far from the kind of crushing defeatism that normally accompanies truly dark albums. The Holy Bible is, if anything, the opposite of wallowing in its anxiety: it's defiantly kicking around in the darkness, perhaps depressed but angry about it. It's full of vitriol, vim and vitality.
The Manics haven't fully abandoned their rock anthem genetics with The Holy Bible, but even the more traditional songs sound wraught and neurotic. Where Gold Against the Soul brought forward the notion of Manics as arena-embracing rock heroes, The Holy Bible's first taster was "Faster", a frantic post-punk fit where the closest thing to a crowd-pleaser is the repeated yells of "man kills everything". Much like the rest of the album, it's twitchy, twisted and detached, with outbursts of rage splattered across it. The Holy Bible is in a constant balancing act between sinking into that rage and finding some weird sense of humour out of it, with the sociopathically calm "Yes" in one end and the batshit dictator/sex-metaphore mashup pop punk of "Revol" on the other. "IfwhiteAmerica..." could have been a metal song if you tweaked its heaviness just a little bit, though in its current state it flips brilliantly between the molotov riot verses, Eagleland backing vocals of the bridge and riff-chugging choruses. The manic "Of Walking Abortion" and "Archives of Pain" are two of the album's most ravaged cuts where the neurotic flicks of the context surrounding the album push to surface. The latter in particular is fearsome in its inspired unhingedness, while also featuring one of the band's few iconic bass lines - and if anything describes the album's twisted nature, it's Bradfield sneakily slipping his own band's name into the litany of dictators and mass murderers as an off-the-cuff joke. That kind of erratic streak of attitude further stops The Holy Bible from being just a really dark album. Where Richey wasn't already hiding a very subtle sense of snark in the lyrics, Bradfield takes the opportunity to cut through the tension by occasionally sounding genuinely delighted he gets to go wild with the music. The devilish glee of "P.C.P.", kicking the walls down in peppy punk abandon at the end, finally offers a little bit of genuine free-spirit fun (or as close as you can get to it) right at the very end of the album in an unexpectedly light finale
Still, it has its dark spots. "4st 7lb" is downright harrowing because of how brutally naked emotionally it is, and the deranged verse melodies of "Die in the Summertime" give it a foreboding undertone that crawls under the skin. Even the unexpected tranquil of "This Is Yesterday", with its shimmery summery guitars and serene atmosphere, is ultimately a song that hides an incredible amount of sadness within its facade; but amongst its fellow songs, it still sounds like a momentary oasis in the middle of the frozen wasteland. "She Is Suffering" is an odd one out in first glance, with its more elegant production and disconcerningly groove-flirting, Nirvana-goes-disco rhythm sounding almost too suave in this kind company; but its haunting atmosphere placed together with the four-to-the-floor beat is a surprisingly effective combination. Even all these songs have pieces of them that stop them from going too deep, like the bright choruses of "Die in the Summertime" or the typically Manics-esque guitar solo breaking through "She Is Suffering". The only song that really just lingers in its mood is the brooding holocaust lament "The Intense Humming of Evil", which is as obviously serious as you'd expect: it's a sparsely arranged hollow ghost of a song built over an ominous drum loop, and it's utterly removed sound-wise from anything else the band had ever done. Out of everything on the album it's the song that most hammers in the sheer bleakness of the record's mindset, as if the band decided that the horror of its subject matter is too grave to not submit to it, and that in order to hammer it through the music should have only the most necessary elements and nothing more.
The diversity within its covers and the album's raw power is why The Holy Bible continues to amaze. On The Holy Bible the Manics accelerated furiously beyond their established scope and came up with something absolutely crazy, definitely inspired and absolutely unique. While they had already proven their worth as a powerful rock band, The Holy Bible's fixated intensity and irreverent musical attitude reveals a side of the band that they've very rarely let shine. Musically they're more adventurous, opening more doors than the last two albums combined, and some of the areas here still stand out in their uniqueness in the band's whole back catalogue. It's why The Holy Bible has always been to me more about its music as a whole than about its words - it's still thrilling in its off-the-cuff melodies and sheer strength, and listening through it is an intense experience because of how fervent it is. It's not quite a perfect record but it's close, and the gap is only down to personal minutae rather than any actual chinks in the armour.
In February 1995 Edwards left the hotel the band was staying right before the start of their American tour, and vanished; no trace of him has been found since. His disappearance closed off the first chapter of Manics' history, and ensured that the band could never really follow up on The Holy Bible even if they had wanted to (and much later on they would try). It not only sealed the album's legacy as Richey's last will and testament, but ensured that it would stay as a particularly fearsome and wholly unique creature within the band's discography. If their early days were characterised by the complete and sincere conviction in what the band were doing regardless of what the outside world was thinking, then The Holy Bible was its unexpected apex: it's singular in its vision and truly committed to its sound and themes, characterised by pure gut instinct far more than anything else they would go to record. As the most iconic line in the entire album puts it, "I know I believe in nothing but it is my nothing".
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