1) Elvis Impersonator: Blackpool Pier; 2) A Design for Life; 3) Kevin Carter; 4) Enola/Alone; 5) Everything Must Go; 6) Small Black Flowers That Grow in the Sky; 7) The Girl Who Wanted to Be God; 8) Removables; 9) Australia; 10) Interiors (Song for Willem De Kooning); 11) Further Away; 12) No Surface All Feeling
Loss and determination projected through orchestrated guitar anthems. Not just a new chapter but a grand new start.
Key tracks: "A Design for Life"; "Enola/Alone"; "Everything Must Go"
The Holy Bible had always been an anomaly. Their third album wasn't part of the expected trajectory for Manic Street Preachers, it was something that burst out of its context: a high-strung band lashing out their internal intensity. They would have never been able to follow it up like-to-like, and certainly not after Richey Edwards vanished without a trace in February 1995. Manics' entire legacy was looking to finish there and then, three best friends uncertain whether they could continue without the fourth. It took the coming together of one particular song to convince the band to continue, to assure them that they still had more to say by staying together.
The Manics didn't fit in with the Britpop scene raging on in the mid-90s UK, but "A Design for Life" briefly made them part of it. Much like Pulp and "Common People", this was a seasoned band striking a chord by painting the ever-present British class tensions clearly visible and dressing it up in a form that captured the attention of those who heard it over the radio. The Manics had been plenty anthemic before, see Gold Against the Soul for the 101 class on that, but "A Design for Life" is something else. It's refined, with its leading jangle and the petite guitar strikes punctuating every beat. The strings feel alive, swiveling around the structure of the song with class. The chorus is a grand act, each appearance like a rousing finale in its own right, Bradfield shouting his lungs with the belief of his band's namesake. There's a weighty gravitas to his voice and to the sound that the band had never had before. It lead to "A Design for Life" becoming a career-defining hit in the UK and it launched the band to mass consciousness in an unprecedented way. For a band who had semi-jokingly started their career with the manifesto of becoming global superstars from day one (and then split immediately afterwards but let's forget about that one), it was a huge moment purely from a personal perspective; just completely unintended this time around.
That moment of triumph was something the band deserved after everything they had gone through, as they resurrected themselves from a moment of darkness in a phoenix-like fashion. Everything Must Go is an album about loss and learning how to deal with it, finding the will to live again no matter how hard it seems - if The Holy Bible was a dark, fearful storm then its follow-up was the day after, everything in the neigbourhood damaged and blown down but the gentler skies above giving the chance to rebuild again. "A Design for Life" is uncharacteristic in its directly political nature for the rest of the album, with Wire spending most of his debut as the band's sole lyricist reflecting on loss ("Enola/Alone" was inspired by a photo of Richey and the band's former, deceased manager Philip Hall posing together), the internal guilt of moving on from it ("Everything Must Go") and the instinctual desire to run away ("Australia", so named because it was the furthest place geographically that came to Wire's mind). Songs that the band had started with Richey and still featured his lyrics were chosen to be finalised as a form of tribute; to cap it off, the reverb-drenched outro to the album-closing "No Surface All Feeling" is the only known instance of Richey's guitar playing making it to a studio album. None of the three men were fully comfortable moving on without Richey but while the album is surrounded by his ghost, the music itself plays with clarity and liberation: it's a three-legged dog learning to run again and embracing the unity their band still brings to them.
Everything Must Go sets up what we can consider the archetypical Manic Street Preachers sound: big guitar walls, a helping of strings and a sense of uplifting melancholy permeating throughout, where quiet introspection meets grandstanding choruses. The key difference is how the band tone things down from the flashiness of the earlier albums; where the band formerly embraced the dramatics of their whole performance, now the actual song has become the key thing that everything else works in service to. This includes Bradfield cutting his guitar histrionics down and placing less emphasis on showcase solos, sometimes even opting for a less-is-more approach as seen on "A Design for Life", and overall paying more attention to the overall arrangement of each part rather than just letting himself lead the way at all times. Everything Must Go offers the band's best melodic work to date and it matches it perfectly with the triumphant rock choruses that the bound found themselves drawn into following the initial conception of "A Design for Life" serving as the launch pad. These anthems are the best parts of the album as well, with the bittersweet "Enola/Alone" and the gloriously sweeping title track easily rivalling their famous hit sibling, and the escapist joy of "Australia" and the heartache of "No Surface All Feeling" providing the late-album counterparts that more than match up. They're all phenomenal songs, full of heart as much as they have sheer power. The only thing you could count against them is the overall middling drum sound that discolours the entire album, which lacks the punch needed for these types of songs; it's not a major complaint but it's been my bugbear since day one and I had to interject it somewhere here.
The more nuanced direction also gives way to some sudden breaks from its guitar volume. The primarily acoustic "Small Black Flowers That Grow in the Sky" most obviously of all; it serves as the unofficial direct tribute to Richey, utilising one of the more directly sad lyrics he left behind as the guiding force for a solemn, melancholy number that gets a gentle lilt from a delicate harp behind Bradfield's otherwise bare-bones arrangement. "Removables" is the other most identifiably Edwards-heavy song of the set and it's also similarly moody, with a brooding, growing intensity which points out that The Holy Bible days weren't that long ago, remixing that album's musical landscape into something more befitting of the band at the present. The best thing about the sequence where both of these tracks appear is that the song sandwiched between them, "The Girl Who Wanted to Be God", is the album's single-handedly most musically jubilant number, and it makes the entire trio of songs sound stronger thanks to the contrast; "The Girl Who Wanted to Be God" itself is a jubilant, sweet number full of strings and love for vintage pop swoons, and it jumps furthest and brightest into the orchestral accompaniments that the band saw fit to include across the album. There's also a leap to suddenly acknowledging rhythm which paves way to some of the album's best deep cuts. "Kevin Carter" is an iconic single on its own right but somewhat hidden in-between the more obvious anthems, but its borderline funky groove and Moore's trumpet debut is something previously unheard for the band and somehow perfectly underlines the song's neurotic lyrics. "Interiors" is the album's hidden gem, similarly dominated by its janky bass groove which gives way to a musically poignant, swooping chorus where James' voice resonates far more than the song's biographical nature would allude to.
That extra oomph of resonance - or feeling, or however you want to call it - is at the heart of Everything Must Go. The songs are great (though "Further Away", which is a good enough tune, always felt a bit in the wrong crowd even if it's grown on me over the years), not just musically top-notch but they bear the sound of the formerly almost cartoon-like band finally revealing their true selves, and letting the emotion underneath subsequently wash over. Manics accidentally tapped into the musical zeitgeist of the time but Everything Must Go has always been an awkward fit to the Britpop canon, not just because of the history of the band themselves but because it's too sincere, too heartfelt among the company of posers and patriotic cosplay that most of its peers were characterised by. The songs have the bombast of a stadium-soaring fist-pumper (and they'd naturally become such for the band), but beneath the walls of sound is a heartbroken band putting absolutely everything of themselves into every single note, because they needed it to survive and to go on. It doesn't matter if the subject matter was a political lambast, a biographical narrative of whoever they last read about or something thus-far uncharacteristically sincere - it's made to sound like the band depend on it to survive. It's the most characteristic element of Everything Must Go and the aspect that splits it apart from the numerous attempts the band would try to recreate its sound in the coming decades: come in for the catchy choruses, stay for the sudden emotional swells.
When the Manics debuted with Generation Terrorists, they were characterised by the album's pure conviction for the music and what it represented, in the way that the ideal kind of debut from a hungry young band only can. Only five years had passed in-between, but the raggedy glam punks were now melancholy, experienced craftsmen and Everything Must Go stands as a new debut album, re-establishing Manics' new identity. Everything Must Go carries the legacy of its preceding album trilogy on its back but it is in the purest possible way a true reinvention for the band. While it's massively different from the albums before it, its sound and style are a natural fit for the band, as if this is what they were born for all this time along, it just took an odd way to get there. It's not a shout against the former albums, nor its me saying this is absolutely one of the band's very best: but it's a life-affirming record that's more special than it mayhaps initially comes across as.
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