Manic Street Preachers - Send Away the Tigers (2007)

1) Send Away the Tigers; 2) Underdogs; 3) Your Love Alone Is Not Enough; 4) Indian Summer; 5) The Second Great Depression; 6) Rendition; 7) Autumnsong; 8) I'm Just a Patsy; 9) Imperial Bodybags; 10) Winterlovers; 11) Working Class Hero [hidden track]
 

They trashed the party and brushed off the crowds, now it's the morning after hangover and they're texting everyone to apologise. Here's some ready-made radio singles for you, just as cynical and empty as that sounds.

Key tracks: "Indian Summer", "Imperial Bodybags", "Winterlovers"

After Lifeblood, the Manics went drifting. The band had created an incredible record but they had let it intentionally fly under the radar with the bare minimum of promotion, following a few years of attempted detachment from their late 90s mainstream success. Afterwards the band took a break, with both James Dean Bradfield and Nicky Wire releasing solo albums to similarly little recognition apart from the established fanbase. The arena-headlining days had started to fade into memory. Even though they had intentionally pushed themselves away from being airwave darlings, by the time the band reconvened to record their next album they were already starting yearn back to it - on second thought, it was fun being popular rock stars.

The Manics’ approach to rectify this is a somewhat misaimed exercise of trying to capture old glories, but misunderstanding why they appealed the first time around. There isn’t anything inherently wrong in going back to an older sound and when in Manics’ case this is back to big guitar walls, in concept that’s fine - even I would say that the first thing that comes to my mind when I think about Manics are the big guitar-lead rock moments. But Send Away the Tigers is characterised by how it captures the form but not the spirit of the past. The songs have been written solely to fit into a perceived category of what makes a traditional Manics anthem, and even before we get to the meat-and-potatoes production they’ve been overengineered within the inch of their lives to fill their roles. This is the big single, this is the stadium fist-pump moment, this is the big slow burner, this is the political punk rocker. It’s Manics doing karaoke of themselves, going through ideas they think will be appreciated by the general crowds while avoiding the ones that were present in the albums that didn’t produce hits.

“Underdogs” is somewhat of a perfect example of the misgivings of Send Away the Tigers and the album’s broken spirit. The song was released as a sneaky preview single before the actual start of the campaign, as a thank you song for the fans, as a song about the fans. Instead, it felt more insulting for them because how completely off it is tonally. Musically it tries to go for a rowdy punk vibe, but it's rather like a group of grown men awkwardly trying to be young reckless teens again - the musical equivalent of the ill-fitting teen goth eyeliner during your old man’s midlife crisis phase. It’s meant to be a celebration of the fans but its ‘you are misfits and freaks and we love you for it’ emphasises the wrong parts of that sentence, and no fan appreciation song should ever contain the lines “people like you need to fuck people like me”. "Underdogs" tries to be anarchistic and controversial like the band’s old glam punk phase, but it's not natural and no one’s heart seems to be in it. The fact that the song contains one of the most obvious copy/paste editing errors I’ve heard (the first chorus ends with an abrupt mid-syllable “TH-“, as a direct cut from the final chorus that's about to launch to the finale) just underlines how no one seemed to really care about the final song, just as long as it looked the right part. It's actually a little incredible how much it backfired - the reaction to the song was so crushing that when the album was re-released for its tenth anniversary, the song was retroactively scrubbed away from existence.

But it sets the scene for Send Away the Tigers, an album full of similar by-the-numbers tickbox exercises and clunky ideas. The Manics try to make big rock moments like they used to back in the mid-90s, with a splash of the politics that Wire wants to be sure you know the band are famous for, but the actual songwriting has been brushed off to the side from way of making sure the songs fit those particular aesthetics. They're quick verse-chorus-verse repetitions whi are kept within tidy and radio-friendly three and half minutes but rarely do they offer an interesting melody or an idea you'd remember afterwards, the obligatory guitar solos are present just because they’re expected and not because they have anything to show, and Wire’s supposed to return to his old fiery lyrics results in clunky, wishy-washy nothings. The songs aren’t so much bad as they are just a lot of nothing - rote runthroughs of obvious hooks and riffs that lack feeling or drive, devoid of anything unexpected or new in their arrangements. You do get familiar notes of past greats but without the melodies that made them so memorable. "The Second Great Depression" should be an epic wall of sound in line with "Ready for Drowning" or "No Surface All Feeling" but it's running through the motions with second-rate Britrock mannerisms even as it reaches its peaks, like a washed out veteran band playing the mandatory new song among the hits that people came to listen.

There are only few actual misfires - “Underdogs”, the baffling cheesefest “Autumnsong” (with its equally baffling “baby what have you done to your hair” lyric which you’ll hear several times, because all the verses are the same in peak Wire laziness), the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it throwaway “Rendition” that’s one of the weakest songs found on a Manics album - but even they’re not actively offensive. I’m happy to even defend the finale of “Underdogs” from a purely musical perspective as the song finally gets some kind of a backbone. But they’re clunky misrepresentations of the strengths of the band playing them. The enjoyable parts feel almost like accidents and often come with caveats, like how the simple organ intro leading to the opening guitars of "Send Away the Tigers" stands out because in an album full of uninteresting arrangements, it's at least something less monotonous. Notably “Your Love Alone Is Not Enough”, which netted the Manics the brief hit they desperately wanted, has a chorus that blissfully soars and nets that nice dopamine hit it seeks to score, but unfortunately it’s marred by the frustrating and borderline annoying stop-start nature of the verses. Even the usually endlessly charismatic Nina Persson sounds bored and barely engaged with the song. "Your Love Alone Is Not Enough" stands out because it sounds like the most time was put into it in order to turn it into an event of a lead single that would pop out when playing in the radio, but it gives the impression that it was so overworked on that no one had any enthusiasm left when the recording finally started.

But there are also real silver linings. “I’m Just a Patsy” and "Imperial Bodybags" are the few times where the band sound happy to be back in familiar musical territory again, with a bit more bite in their arena-pleading choruses and some life in their arrangements. They both have their yeah-buts (mainly in the lyrics department) but they bring out the genuine rejuvenated energy you expected the 'Manics return to rock' album to be full of: the bombastic "I'm Just a Patsy" backs its crowd singalong antics with an actually strong set of hooks (and an intriguingly effective fade-in-fade-out set of synth strings), and the chugga-chugga riffs and shuffling drums "Imperial Bodybags" sound like the band's actually having fun. The verses of “Indian Summer” are basically a shameless retread of “A Design for Life” but the song carries some actual gravitas and the its elegant bridge leading to the unexpectedly low-key chorus gives a glimpse of what this project could have been. “Winterlovers” is by far the only actual, real keeper of the record: it’s the one song where the band sound like they genuinely care, that it has some actual passion behind its wistfulness. The instrumental breakdown where all the band’s core instruments - the bass, the guitar and the drums - all get a little special spotlight moment in a row is the single most memorable instrumental section of the album and signals that some actual thought went into this song, instead of the boring arrangements of nearly everything else.

It's still faint praise though. There are parts of Send Away the Tigers I enjoy but the album is a tiny de-clawed kitten pretending it's growling fearsomely like a full-grown tiger, and all the loud guitars in the world can't hide the averageness of the songs - what good is there isn't enough to make an album you'd want to revisit when there are so many more, better albums with actual heart in them. It's the latter part that really brings the album down for me. Returning to guitars made sense for the Manics at this point, following the de-emphasis of the instrument around the Forever Delayed/Lifeblood years and the solo trips inevitably making the band want to reconvene in as Manics-like fashion as possible. But Send Away the Tigers doesn't sound like a group of friends refreshed and rocking out, it sounds like it was designed in a boardroom, created in order to get a foothold in the spotlight. I'm not going to call it a sell-out album because it's not like there was an arena-rock sized hole in the post-landfill indie recovery years ca. 2007; although even I winced at the desperation of making an appearance in every British TV show known to man as it culminated in an embarrassing appearance of playing the instrumental to "Imperial Bodybags" during a daytime TV talk show wacky live competition section. But if Wire's token descriptor quote for this period was "Guns n Roses playing The White Album", it's closer to post-MTV bloat Axl Rose covering solo McCartney: overengineered and safe of expectations, by people who made better things when throwing themselves fully into ideas they believed in even if no one else did.

I'm going to finish this with a personal anecdote, as I so often do with Manics album reviews because of the way this band has managed to weave into my life. My main memory of Send Away the Tigers is my very first listen of it, released during my first trip to the UK, listening to it there and then in the place I stayed over. It should have been a big moment - I was a humongous fan and a then-anglophile and so a new Manics album during my first UK trip was practically a daydream - but I mainly just recall feeling absolutely nothing after the album finished playing. None of the emotional highs of the previous first listens, none of the familiar special buzz I felt whenever I'd hear Bradfield's voice or the distinct Manics tone their music had. Just nothing. Send Away the Tigers shook me off the fanboy phase and I never really recovered from it. I've since made my peace with the album but it still carries that same nothingness; the drop between it and the previous records becomes even more tangible when you listen to it alongside the other albums, especially if you go about it chronologically. It's an empty shell of a record, from a band who could do so much better.

Rating: 5/10

Various Artists - Deus Ex: Game of the Year Edition (2001)

1) Main Title (GOTY Remix); 2) Intro Sequence; 3) Liberty Island; 4) UNATCO; 5) Battery Park; 6) NYC Streets; 7) Lebedev's Airfield; 8) Airfield Action; 9) Enemy Within; 10) Desolation (Hong Kong Canal); 11) The Synapse (Hong Kong Streets); 12) Hong Kong Action; 13) Majestic 12 Labs; 14) Versalife; 15) Naval Base; 16) Paris Streets; 17) DuClare Chateau; 18) Paris Action; 19) Return to NYC; 20) Oceanlab; 21) Ocean Action; 22) Oceanlab Complex; 23) Vandenberg; 24) Begin the End (Bunker); 25) Area 51; 26) Ending 1; 27) Ending 2; 28) Ending 3; 29) The Illuminati; 30) DX Club Mix

Put on a trench coat, and fight some conspiracies... A classic game has a great score, obviously - even with the usual soundtrack caveats.

Key tracks: "Main Title", "UNATCO", "DuClare Chateau"

Deus Ex, AKA one of video gaming’s all-time greats, is likely very familiar for most people who’d choose to read a review of its soundtrack, but here's a quick recap should you simply be archive binging my reviews (thank you). The 2000 release from Ion Storm Austin (not to be confused with their Dallas sibling studio who will most definitely never see their name in any gaming greats retrospectives) is widely considered a landmark in gaming, with deep gameplay, excellent world building, writing so good that it makes the game’s Conspiracy Theory Greatest Hits narrative actually work, and an emphasis on one of gaming’s most esteemed but widely misunderstood buzzwords: choice. Deus Ex is a player’s playground to go about however they please, and only half of it is actually ever pointed out explicitly. Between multilayered level design and the variety of gameplay styles catered to, Deus Ex gives players impressively free hands to go about their journey in their own way: some of it has been intended by the dev team who seemingly thought of everything, but the degree of completely valid gameplay choices that reward the ingenuity of more experimental/crazy players makes it stand out even today, two decades after its release. It's the kind of game that by its very nature creates a very dedicated and passionate fanbase, and which is spoken about with mystical reverence by those who’ve played it - and it still warrants that esteem to this day, only being dated in its graphics.

Part of what makes Deus Ex so captivating is its score, simply by way of its sound. The composers - mostly Alexander Brandon, with features from Michiel van den Bos and Dan Gardopeé - had prior video game credits but were mostly famous within the MOD tracker scene. MODs were originally an Amiga sound format but which by the late 90s had developed further and in turn created a veritable community dedicated to composing vast amounts of original music on the format, as well as the occasional PC game score. MODs have a very distinct synth sound to them, rough around the edges but with a particularly strong atmospheric texture, and the choice for Deus Ex to utilise the sound was an unconventional stroke of genius. Even back in 2000 Deus Ex wasn’t a particularly pretty game but it had a very distinct visual atmosphere to it. The designers built their ambitious ideas through an engine that didn’t necessarily stretch to accommodate all of them perfectly, and while set in the future with all the sci-fi polish that it entailed, the world itself was ugly and gritty. The very peculiar characteristic tone of MODs suited the visuals perfectly: high-tech and futuristic, but with a twang that dislodged it from any particular time period.

The choice of utilising the MOD tracker sound really adds a whole unique depth to Deus Ex and contributes so much to the game’s atmosphere, but the relatively free hands that the composers were given in terms of the actual compositions is what makes it a great score. Brandon and co didn’t just treat the music they made as background music, and in fact if you listened to the score on its own you might get an entirely different impression on the intensity and energy of the gameplay compared to what it actually is. It’s a hook-driven score, with songs that have distinct sections and development across their length. Most video game scores tend to either be atmospheric background textures or snappy compositions built around a tight loop that warrants repetition; Deus Ex’s score mostly resembles fully-formed songs. There’s still plenty of what you would consider more typical soundtrack fare, and the contrast between the centrepiece songs and the bridges in-between is pretty wide in terms of memorability, but the same sensibilities both in production and composition are filtered through. For a game that often encourages the player to take their time and focus on its world, the soundtrack is unexpectedly populated by actual jams with a rush of energy coursing through them.

The best thing here is, without a doubt, the main theme. It’s probably my favourite video game theme of all time: it’s epic in nature in a way that represents all the superlative feelings I have for the game so accurately, it has a killer central melody, the way it transforms throughout is a little journey of its own without ever going on a downswing, and the MOD production gives it an absolutely perfect unique aesthetic. The Game of the Year remix that appears on this particular soundtrack release is a little beefier and loses some of that MOD magic, and I prefer the original; but the version here still bears all of the strengths of the theme as a piece of music. Other particular standouts include the ambient melodies of “UNATCO” which has rightfully become the most iconic part of the soundtrack alongside the main theme (sneakily reprised in Deus Ex: Human Revolution for example), the gritty groove of “NYC Streets” and the beautiful piano-led melancholy of “DuClare Chateau” which then switches onto a stylish, cyber-noir stomper.

As far as the style and sound go this is as perfect a soundtrack as you could imagine for a game like Deus Ex, but the typical soundtrack release caveat applies here too: as great as it is to have the complete score, there's very few games with all-killer no-filler soundtracks, just because of the nature of games and especially narrative-oriented ones such as Deus Ex. Catch me unaware and make me list my favourite game soundtracks off the top of my head, and I'd probably happily include Deus Ex within that list; but my favourite way to enjoy this soundtrack is a personally abridged version that cuts out some of the thirty songs to create a definitive dive into the world of the game.

Rating: 8/10

Arcade Fire - Neon Bible (2007)

1) Black Mirror; 2) Keep the Car Running; 3) Neon Bible; 4) Intervention; 5) Black Wave/Bad Vibrations; 6) Ocean of Noise; 7) The Well and the Lighthouse; 8) (Antichrist Television Blues); 9) Windowsill; 10) No Cars Go; 11) My Body Is a Cage

Arcade Fire hear people talk about their epic sound and decide that yes, we can top that.

Key tracks: "Intervention", "No Cars Go", "My Body Is a Cage"

Funeral was a record of skyscraping anthems which stole people's hearts at large, but it came from a grounded setting: it was music by a group of ordinary people escaping shared sorrow through communal celebration, manifested into something larger than all of them combined. I don’t think Arcade Fire necessarily meant to make it so colossal, it just shaped up that way through the combined power of a collective of multi-instrumentalists putting all of their hearts behind the music. But the size of their sound became Arcade Fire’s shtick: their songs became synonymous with the rapturous joy of hundreds or thousands of individuals singing along to every wordless melody, strings and bells and whistles in tow. 

On the other hand Neon Bible, the direct follow-up to Funeral, is a giant by design. The crowd-raiser moments are grander, the choruses bellow out bigger and the drama fuelling them is more intense, and it’s the clearest in the production. Neon Bible's crescendoing walls of sound are made up of layers upon layers of elements that expand far beyond the capacities of the band themselves: there’s choirs, there’s orchestras, there’s the booming church organ that’s become the album’s signature sound even though it only appears in two songs. A lot of the hyper-awareness to a wider concept and unifying design which has become second nature for the band (for the chagrin of some) started to pop up at this stage as well, with unified dress codes, cryptic teaser trailers and running threads through the otherwise unrelated lyrics. This was Arcade Fire intentionally going big, extending their reach far beyond Funeral's scope as if to prove they deserved to be one of the biggest acts of the Pitchforkverse. The message of Neon Bible went the same route and also took a leap further from the personal drama of its predecessor, as it cast its sights into the wider world. It’s not subtle about its message - “not much chance of survival if the Neon Bible is right” - and its delivered with the fire of an apocalyptic preacher shouting at the masses about the end of the world. Funeral was a happy accident of circumstances - Neon Bible was made from the ground up to be a bombastic show of force, a band trying to direct their own hype by amplifying what they understood made them special the first time around.

As a direct result there's a kind of po-faced self-awareness and intentional seriousness around Neon Bible. “Black Mirror” kicks off the album like a cult leader summoning forth the titular device to reflect on the doom and gloom of the world, and from thereon in the album conjures another apocalyptic theme after another. Greed, war, delusion, personal disillusionment, religious hypocrisy; even the moments of escapism sound uncertain, like when the “let’s go” rallying calls of “No Cars Go” are undercut with a quiet “don’t know where we’re going...” just as the music switches gears. It’s clear Win Butler wants to be a spokesperson for Important Things and though he’s not always successful (for every insight he makes, he throws out a clunker like “MTV, what have you done to me?”), he’s absolutely earnest about his intentions. His power as a frontman - and to the same extent Regine Chassagné's power as his vocal counterpart - is the undoubting passion and sincerity he brings into his ideas and performance, and the conviction and zeal which made the personal anecdotes of Funeral so strong are just as powerful here. If Butler is preachy, then he’s the kind of preacher who can charm a crowd to eat up every single warning of fire and brimstone he can shout out. And this time he’s come armed with the sound most overwhelming: out of all Arcade Fire albums, Neon Bible leans heaviest into the innate epic theatrics of the band.  

I have an unabashed, probably uncool love for music that sounds massive. It doesn't suit everything and it's not a surefire way to win my praise, but my heart does often flutter with honest awe when steady build-ups explode into epic finales: I'm the guy who will predictably love all those epic closer songs hovering around ends of tracklists, smiling as the fireworks and production credits explode during the credits roll. Neon Bible is, basically, one such moment after another, with everything but the title track (which is a quiet, two-minute rumination that's more characteristic of an interlude) going gigantic at least once during its course, sometimes several times in different ways. It has its musical vision set to the absolute maximum, the epic finales of Funeral turned into full songs. And it never fails, because Arcade Fire are geniuses in this game. Neon Bible may put on the guise of serious doom mongering, but in practice it's a thrill ride: joy and anxiety holding hands and riding a tidal wave of production elements and elaborate arrangements, moving from one instrumental high to another, everyone hollering and encouraging the listener to join. The lyrical concepts accompanying the music may falter from time to time from scaling up, but in the song department the band score perfect strikes in a fearsomely consistent fashion. 

The reason I love big bombastic finales so much is because when executed properly, they are incredibly cathartic - they explicitly pull out those big emotions out of you and give them the ability to spread their wings with the music, making you feel that nothing matters in this world but the very moment you're connecting with right now. But you need the right kind of song to go with it, and there isn't a single track on Neon Bible that doesn't hit that mark, so much so that reading through the tracklist becomes a catalogue of moments in time when I've been overwhelmed by the Great Big Feeling that they coaxed out: the communal hand-clap hullaballoo of "Keep the Car Running", the liberating freak-out breakdown splicing through the hyper-rockabilly of "(Antichrist Television Blues)", the swelling feels that sweep in as the band on "Windowsill" are drowned by the choir and wipe away the memories of the lyric about MTV, the "Un! Deux! Trois! Dis miroir noir!" in "Black Mirror", the technicolour light of the blissed-out chorus to "The Well and the Lighthouse", the tone flip when the bright "Black Wave" morphs into "Black Vibrations" and the song feels the pressure of the shadow of the great all-drowning sea looming over it. They are wonderful songs through and through full of hooks and melodies that live on, that funnel their powers towards a singular point until they burst in ecstatic magic.

The greatest showcase for the power of the album’s arrangements lies towards the end. “No Cars Go” was first released on the band’s debut EP, but it's an awkward fit there: a good idea begging for an execution that doesn't leave it limping across the floor. Here, it's been brought back and resurrected into the colossus it aspired to be. Every single second of it goes off - each swoon of its strings, each voice in the choir, each underpinning note of the horn section, the completely superlative breakdown following its second chorus that is one of purest expressions of joy in music I've heard. It’s potentially the most bombastic Arcade Fire have ever been but it deserves to be larger than life, and it sounds so, so gorgeous in this final form: it's the ideal behind every life-affirming moment that was heard on Funeral, gilded and tangible. It's the natural peak for Neon Bible's multi-faceted journey, and following it up with something else in the tracklist seems like a surefire way to be let down by context, but "My Body Is a Cage" defies any expectations you'd set for it subconsciously. What you'd expect for a fitting follow-up to "No Cars Go" to close the record would be to attempt to scale its epic heights even further, or do something completely contrasting, and so "My Body Is a Cage" does both. It's the album's darkest moment, the neon shades of the bible faintly flickering on and off one by one, with Win Butler singing from what sounds like the middle of oblivion - far from the blissful optimism that came before. But more significantly, there are two songs on the album that feature the majestic, all-encompassing grand church organ, which by its very nature is literally the biggest musical showpiece on the record, and "My Body Is a Cage" is one of the two. That moment halfway through as the organ kicks into full gear following a brief silence and when the band try to match its loudness and intensity is the sound of the apocalypse coming that the Neon Bible warned about all the way back at the start of the record. It makes the hairs on your back stand up for attention: Win Butler yearns for redemption and liberation and he sings it with such conviction that you, too, start to believe in its rapture. It's a phenomenal showpiece, and a stunning way to close the album.

The other organ-featuring song is "Intervention", which is an Arcade Fire powerhouse moment on steroids. Build-ups, back and forth vocals, impassioned performance, fist-pumping chorus - but now with a giant organ right off the bat and an orchestra to accompany it (the moment when the strings appear is one of the band's greatest singular moments). It's unashamedly huge, and it's basically manna from heaven for my musical tastebuds; and it's a perfect example that no matter how many things you place on top of one another on Neon Bible, they each still get the breathing space needed to make an impact. It's a impressive song with an impressive sound, yet still so full of little details and atmosphere which turn it from great to iconic. The arrangements serve the songs and the other way around: both built around one another in perfect symbiosis, the production emphasising the tonal undercurrents of the songs that were from the get-go written for these grand ideas. And while everything on Neon Bible is huge in comparison to many other albums, it's still at its very best when it really goes all-in on that impactful wall of sound, as evidenced by "Intervention", "No Cars Go", "My Body Is a Cage", or "Ocean of Noise". That song may be the album's most graceful moment - a yearning slow dance by the moonlit pier - but it becomes something wholly different when Butler backs away and lets the strings and horns take over as the lead, every colour in the spectrum flooding in synesthesic beauty and tugging more heartstrings than any singular voice ever could. Neon Bible sometimes literally covers its singers with its arrangements, but it becomes the logical extension for the feelings those voices started to express, amplifying them rather than drowning them out.

Because Neon Bible and Arcade Fire get it. They get why these grand bombastic moments can hit so powerfully to the listener, why sometimes you should strive for something universal, and they understand how you can make something so big without it sounding crowded or overproduced. Sounding epic isn't simply about making things louder: it's about taking the core emotion of the song, and then reshaping it with other tools until it becomes the core of very moment you live in. Neon Bible is in my books a perfect representation of that. It resonates because it makes a point about stirring its - and your - emotions into its central tenet: be it the grim foreboding, the tearjerking bittersweetness or the unbridled glee that the band so effortlessly weave in and out and in-between from. Despite how it's a less intimate album than its predecessor, which it often gets compared to as its immediate follow-up, Neon Bible has always felt more personal to me than Funeral. I joined the Funeral hype squad a little after everyone else already had, but Neon Bible felt like my discovery, my experience to intake. The impatient wait for it - with the radio rips, the enticing samples in the teaser trailer (still one of my favourite album trailers) and the internet breadcrumb trail of news that was still something novel - and the eventual first time of hearing its massive sound through my speakers made the album that much more impactful on a personal level, with all those hopes and dreams for what the album could be turning into a reality. It struck a particular connection with me, and over the years it has become more than just its music for me - it's an experience that feels close to my own heart specifically, where I feel like my entire body pays attention to when I listen to it. It's a special record and it's not because of its message or concept or themes - Butler has never made for much of a social commentator and while it has some stand-out moments ("My Body Is a Cage" in particular) lyrically, I'm not intimately attached to the words on the album like I am with many others of my perfect score records. But if a picture says more than a thousand words, then in Neon Bible's case those orchestras, organs, horns and several passionate Canadians shouting harmonies into the microphone express more than any lyric ever could.

Rating: 10/10

Physical corner: Jewel case stored in a cardboard sleeve, and a wonderfully thick lyric/art booklet with alternative artwork underneath the main artwork on the sleeve.

Manic Street Preachers - Lipstick Traces: A Secret History Of... (2003)

CD1: 1) Prologue to History; 2) 4 Ever Delayed; 3) Sorrow 16; 4) Judge Yr'self; 5) Socialist Serenade; 6) Donkeys; 7) Comfort Comes; 8) Mr Carbohydrate; 9) Dead Trees and Traffic Islands; 10) Horses Under Starlight; 11) Sepia; 12) Sculpture of Man; 13) Spectators of Suicide (Heavenly Version); 14) Democracy Coma; 15) Strip It Down (Live); 16) Bored Out of My Mind; 17) Just a Kid; 18) Close My Eyes; 19) Valley Boy; 20) We Her Majesty's Prisoners 
CD2: 1) We Are All Bourgeois Now; 2) Rock 'n' Roll Music; 3) It's So Easy (Live); 4) Take the Skinheads Bowling; 5) Been a Son (Live); 6) Out of Time; 7) Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head; 8) Bright Eyes (Live); 9) Train in Vain (Live); 10) Wrote for Luck; 11) What's My Name? (Live); 12) Velocity Girl; 13) Can't Take My Eyes Off You; 14) Didn't My Lord Deliver Daniel; 15) Last Christmas (Live)

The greatest of b-side bands finally gets a compilation of their secret glories, and as great as this is you still can't help but feel it's a bit of a wasted opportunity.

Key tracks: "Prologue to History", "4 Ever Delayed", "Valley Boy"

As a heads-up, the below text is written by someone who’s devoted a lot of hours of his lifetime to hunting down, listening and compiling Manic Street Preachers b-sides, and is probably pretty obnoxious about it. My rating of this compilation is overall positive and if you’re just looking for a quick evaluation whether this is worth it, the answer is yes. But oh, what it could have been...

It was Manic Street Preachers who made me obsessed about b-sides. I have a wild attraction towards b-sides as an art form - far from the discards, hasty throwaways and mediocre chopping board leftovers that many consider them to be, I think non-album material is often a barely touched treasure trove full of exciting off-beat could-be classics, interesting experiments and underappreciated gems that have every right and chance to become special if you let them. I lament the death of the single, simply because it’s inadvertently also meant the death of the b-side. The Manics are in my books the greatest b-sides band there has ever been: their hidden back catalogue is full of immortal hits, powerful secrets and fascinating curios, where I genuinely feel that only paying attention to their albums is restricting yourself from the full extent of what makes the band special. Even their weakest eras have featured non-album songs which really should have found a place on the albums they represented, instead of what actually ended up on them. And that’s why I think Lipstick Traces, the band's first (and in 2020, only one to date) b-sides compilation, is a bundle of missed opportunities.

I understand that certain compromises must be made if you want to try to appeal to an audience beyond your most obsessed fans. By 2003, you could have filled a five-CD box set with the amount of b-sides the band had released, and that’s just counting the original studio material alone. So, making a more palatable product by selecting the best of the best to fill just a standard double-disc compilation makes sense from that perspective. What makes much less sense is the slapdash way the band have gone about the whole project, while fully knowing just how much people wanted something like this at the time. The song selection is completely haphazard, where fan favourites and songs they voted to be on the compilation on an official poll were ignored in place of choices that seem completely random. Making matters worse, only a single disc of the compilation is devoted to the original studio material, and the second disc is made entirely out of the band’s covers. That selection doesn't even include all the covers the band had officially released by this stage, leaving you with a 45-minute disc with so much empty space that you could have used to include more of what people actually wanted.

The covers disc is my main gripe with Lipstick Traces. For all the praise I heap on the Manics, they’ve never been a particularly interesting band to interpret other people’s songs. Nine times out of then the cover sounds largely identical to the original, just with James’ voice and usually a slightly beefier production; the tenth case only tends to be different because it’s just James all by himself on an acoustic guitar. The most out there of the lot is "Been a Son", where Nirvana's original punk rocker is made into an aggressively acoustic romp-and-stomp. There’s good material on the second disc - “We Are All Bourgeois Now” (McCarthy) is actually quite great (and technically not a b-side as it was a hidden track on Know Your Enemy), the newly recorded version of “Take the Skinheads Bowling” (Camper Van Beethoven) is good rock and roll fun and a marked improvement over the rather anaemic version they originally released in 1997, and James’ acoustic live version of Wham's “Last Christmas” is warm like a cosy fireplace on Christmas Eve. The only real weak spot is the early live rendition of Guns n Roses’ “It’s So Easy” where the band try to be more macho than they can pull off, with a shoddy recording quality to boot. But none of it feels even remarkably essential; you won’t find any revealing re-interpretations here, just recordings of a band faithfully playing songs they like. I can’t imagine why anyone would ever feel like revisiting the second disc outside the intent of giving it another spin because you feel guilty about neglecting it.

For all my moaning about what isn't on Lipstick Traces, the first disc where all the originals lie is still largely golden. The live version of "Strip It Down" is superfluous and unnecessary, "Bored Out of My Mind" and "Socialist Serenade" are fine tracks but definitely not songs I'd weigh over several others, and there's generally a bit of a bias towards the Everything Must Go period, presumably because that was the big success era and the new fans who bought the singles back then probably became very familiar with the respective b-sides. But taken as simply a selection of songs, this is really high class: it could very well be a mirror realm greatest hits record, because so many of the songs could have comfortably been singles in their own right. "Prologue to History" is such a massive anthem full of quickly unhinging anger that its lead position is quite possibly the best possible way to indicate this isn't just a selection of scraps (it was only ever taken off This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours because tonally it had no place on the album), and the gorgeously dreamy "Valley Boy" features one of James' greatest guitar solos and is an epic penultimate piece that could have rightly closed off a proper album. The tender "Sepia", autumnal "Just a Kid" and jovial "Mr Carbohydrate" are all rock solid big hitter rock songs with hooks of diamond. The early Manics' glam punk fury is perfectly represented through "Sorrow 16" (with its iconic spelling lesson), the ridiculous gatling gun vocal hell of "Sculpture of Man", the ugly-tearjerker "Donkeys", the jagged proto-The Holy Bible "Comfort Comes" and the original Heavenly Recordings version of "Spectators of Suicide", which has a raw, unpolished rock charm to it that the near-ambient album version would drop. For all my whinging, it's definitely a representative collection in terms of style and breadth.

There are also two previously unreleased tracks on the first disc, both of which befit the "secret history" angle quite neatly and which manage to tick both the early and later Manics boxes. "4 Ever Delayed" was originally intended to be one of the new songs for the Forever Delayed hits compilation but fell through the cracks for unexplainable reasons (the liner notes on Lipstick Traces are completely non-existent outside basic production credits, which is a tragedy) and only ever found a place on an obscure Japanese EP: it's made of the same ethereal synths and glistening keyboards as all the other new tracks of the era, but punching through with guitar walls in a most befittingly Manics-esque fashion, bridging between the classic Manics sound and the new ideas to come. It's a great, great song and giving it a proper spotlight here is one of Lipstick Traces' best graces. "Judge Yr'self" is a brand new recording but the song itself traces to around 1994-1995 when the band wrote it for potential inclusion on the 1995 Stallone-lead Judge Dredd film - the plans were buried when Richey disappeared and the song was forgotten, until the band decided to finish the job for Lipstick Traces. And it crunches - it's one of the heaviest songs Manics have recorded, veering close to metal at places. It's all visceral aggression and hard guitar riffs, James screaming his lungs out like he hasn't in years. It, too, is an excellent song.

I mentioned Lipstick Traces acting like a mirror realm greatest hits compilation earlier down the line, and it makes the most sense to consider it as a companion piece to Forever Delayed: The Greatest Hits released in the previous year. Both are compilations of great songs marred by slightly eyebrow-raising selections, both have two token new songs, both have second discs of less essential material (if you get the deluxe edition of Forever Delayed with the remixes) - and both should act as a taster for the world of riches that awaits those who choose to dip further. Lipstick Traces is the furthest thing from comprehensive and if you're a more casual listener it probably does a decent purpose, but what I hope it does to anyone who listens to it is to light a yearning to hear more of Manics' hidden treasures. It may take a little effort these days - the anniversary re-releases have almost consistently included all the b-sides from their respective periods which helps - but it's worth it. Lipstick Traces represents the tip of the iceberg: the tip already shines bright, and it only gets even brighter further down. Don't let my fanboy whinging get to you: this would be a 9 without the covers disc bringing the party down.

Rating: 8/10

Squirrelhouse - SPQR (2008)

1) Midnight Train; 2) Truckin'; 3) Knife in the Back; 4) Fours; 5) The Hunter; 6) The Moviegoer; 7) Nagasaki Shuffle; 8) The Searchers; 9) Burn With Me

Rough around the edges but full of promise and some great songs - a good entrance that could and should have been the first step towards something special.

Key tracks: "Midnight Train", "Fours", "Burn With Me"

My formative music-obsessive teenager years coincided with the rapid rise of internet as a tool for any bedroom and garage act to release their music to a wider audience, which was a fantastic thing. MySpace was the vital centre of any new and budding act, and every now and then you ended up discovering something really great: as a naive teenager I hoped and prayed for labels to pick up those demo acts I bumped into so that I could hear the acts blossom, only to be disappointed time and time again on the realisation that those demos were likely the only thing I’d ever hear from them. With the demise of MySpace, for many of the young hopefuls posting their music there all of it's gone now, save for some lucky few individuals who have held onto the files on their hard drives.

I discovered Squirrelhouse through MySpace obviously and I've gone into more detail about it in my review for Friends, a retrospective collection of demos for their tentative second album which was never fully realised. Those demos were what drew me to Squirrelhouse to begin with and got me excited for the future, but unfortunately I wasn't able to visit their past: despite my interest for the quietly released debut album SPQR, it was completely unattainable to someone across several big ponds without a credit card. SPQR remained as little more than a name in my memory until many, many, many years later, when my adult self finally bought what the teenager couldn’t. By that time Squirrelhouse had been quietly long buried and even though Friends had seen the light of day by that point, SPQR is the only full-fledged, “real” album that Squirrelhouse ever released - a feat many young bands of that era never reached, which is why it’s even more of a shame why it’s been buried in history.

The vision that SPQR builds is of a band full of talent but who are still learning the ropes. It's very of its time - post-Funeral, US indie had started to expand its sound and reach wider heights and Squirrelhouse are following up on that, traces of its peers all across its nine songs. Boy-girl vocals, anthem build-ups, heightened urgency and passion, and arrangements beyond the standard rock band set (mostly in form of the horn player who's part of the band's permanent fixture and really works wonders throughout the songs) are all familiar from other parts of the era, but that's fine. One, it's a great sound and it caters for my endless nostalgia but more importantly, Squirrelhouse never sound like they're imitating. It's the kind of debut where the influences are still showing up, but you can tell they're on their way for something unique - which Friends would then realise. If anything, on SPQR the band still aren't entirely certain what they want to be, and dabble across different paths. There's only nine songs and while there's a thin running thread through them, there's a good amount of variety within them, from the more no-nonsense rock of "The Searchers" and "Truckin'" to "Midnight Train", "Knife in the Back" and "Nagasaki Shuffle", which are most reminiscent of the energy, enthusiasm and shout-along hooks that this era is most associated with, and with a little extra polish could have become surefire festival audience pleasers. The most whiplash is brought on by the anxious, riff-heavy push of "The Hunter" and the slacker melodies of "The Moviegoer": while not among the album's best, Squirrelhouse are versatile enough to pull them off and "The Hunter" in particular gets pretty powerful by its furious finale.

The best cuts, though, are the ones that directly point the path forward. The stop-start groove of "Fours" and the increasingly intensifying "Burn With Me" show signs of the ideas that the band would go on to explore with the direction for their second album, with more fluid song structures, more emphasis on the rhythm section leading the way forward and the more intricate melodic arrangements. Both are full of promise, but still more importantly are also really great songs, rough spots and all. For a budding fan, they're the sort of things that whet your appetite for the future; for a band, they're the kinds of songs you put your everything into, to push you into the wider light.

I'm obviously viewing this through multiple layers of retrospective evaluation, and while I bang on about this band being a lost treasure of sorts, I don't think SPQR would have been quite enough on its own to secure that "legacy". It's a good record, with plenty of reasonably strong highlights and you already have the band's own, unique personality showing through. It's also a little rough, occasionally unfocused and the band haven't quite yet fully grasped their own strengths yet. It's exactly the sort of record you show around to your friends in hopes of building up some form of grassroots buzz, idealistically declaring these guys are going to be something to watch out for in the future, just imagine what they could do next. And then, well. If you're a sucker for that mid-late 00s indie sound and desperately need more, SPQR is a good shout - and thanks to the now-also-closed CDBaby and their automatic upload system, the songs continue to have some presence across modern services for those who search for them - but it's also a great example of a debut release which shines with, above all, promise. As probably the number one (and only? To this day, I’m not sure if anyone else remembers them even if they have a few hundred potentially historic listeners on Last.FM) fan of the band these days I heartily recommend it - but it's Friends that really demonstrates why I still think about Squirrelhouse and still wistfully sigh that the promises brought by SPQR never realised fully.

Rating: 7/10

Squirrelhouse - Friends (2015)

1) Show You; 2) Jolene; 3) All That Shit; 4) Let the Right One In; 5) You Don't Know; 6) Friends; 7) Apocalypso; 8) Monster (Part 1); 9) Monster (Part 2)

A lost indie rock gem, buried in the annals of Myspace and finally resurrected in the modern age. I rejoiced. Others should too.

Key tracks: "Show You", "Apocalypso", "Monster (Part 1)"

Among the countless freshly started bands using MySpace to communicate (or trying to do so) to wider audiences in the late 00s, Squirrelhouse were one of the few that really struck me. When I encountered them, they were already one album down and were now busy posting demos from their upcoming second album, and I loved every single one. They had a great thing going on: the guitars were bright, shimmering and swimming through the busy rhythm section, who themselves had a great thing going on with their combination of a loose indie rock dynamic and an undeniable backbone-tapping groove to the interplay between the drums and the bass. They even had a permanent French horn player on the lineup, layering each song with gorgeous horn arrangements which was a win for me back then too. I only had a chance to listen to debut album SPQR retrospectively so it wasn't until many years later that I realised this is exactly what that debut had foreshadowed, with the new songs taking the strongest, most identifiable elements of the band and developing further from the best parts of that debut. Squirrelhouse were still in line with the mid-00s idea of indie rock having a more expansive, epic sound, but the new songs still kept it up close and personal, threatening to reach bombastic heights the band could easily pull off if they wanted to, but keeping it as a tantalising hint in the background for most of the time.

Three songs in particular became repeat hits quickly. "Apocalypso" was the band's signature song of sorts in my mind, perfectly capturing that dry groove of theirs but throwing a fantastic curveball with its sudden switch to a plaintive, almost epic breakdown with that gorgeous French horn coming front and centre with its elegiac melody; it was a band realising they could master two very different tones and experimented by bringing them together, in a way that only made each one that much stronger. Meanwhile the two-part "Monster" was a stellar duo of songs which were completely different from one another but worked in unison perfectly, with the first part a moody drawl preceding the second part's injection of sudden energy into the otherwise decidedly cool and collected sound. I loved those songs to the point of hoping I'd find someone else who loved them as much as I did: when I made a post about them in my very first music blog, I found myself getting contacted by the band's lead writer Paavo Hanninen thanking me for it, which at the time felt special (the fact that he had a Finnish name despite his US upbringing was pretty cool too and made for some nice casual chatter in the emails). While they already had one album out, I never ended up hearing it because ordering it from the US at the time was something I couldn't easily do without a credit card to my name, and truth to be told, at the time I wasn't as interested about it; more than anything else, I was yearning for that second album to be released to hear more songs in line of what the band were teasing with their recent uploads.

The second album never came, for reasons I don't know why. The world forgot about Squirrelhouse, and maybe even Squirrelhouse themselves forgot about Squirrelhouse. I didn't - I had downloaded the demos and kept them around from one hard drive to the next, made them into a little EP and gave it a place in every iPod and MP3 library I had across the years.

One of my favourite moments of the universe showing its more magical side is when years later, as the naive teenager had turned into an office-crawling adult, shortly after I started using Bandcamp I typed in Squirrelhouse's name in the search on a whim. I found something I did not expect at all: Hanninen had uploaded the rest of the sessions for the lost second album there. Several years later, on a brand new music network, I discovered something I never thought I'd find, and stumbling onto Friends is genuinely some of the most excited I've been when it comes to discovering music.

And it's great. It's really great, even if you remove all the obvious nostalgic ties from the mix. The arrangements are excellent, keeping in line with the band's strengths and stand-out sound that the initial set of songs displayed. Brand new cuts like "Let the Right One In" and "Show You" are worthy of just as much love as the familiar songs I had listened to years. "Jolene" and "All That Shit", the other two familiar demos which always felt a little lesser compared to my favourites, have showed a great amount of longevity and endurance - the lazy disco beat and squelchy OTT synths of "Jolene" especially have become a stand-out moment of its own, bearing an off-beat jovial charm in contrast to the more firm and proper tone of the other songs. The old favourites are still just as great, and "Monster (Part 2)" even has a brand new finale now that gives it that one final extra oomph to close the record with, that I never knew it needed until now but which sounds absolutely integral to it. "Apocalypso" of course is still brilliant, its imaginary-stadium sized breakdowns now echoing with extra bittersweetness because it never had the chance to become as widely loved as it deserves to be. It's a lost classic, well among one of the 00s best songs in my books (and even if it was finally fully released in 2015, it would still make onto that list).

Squirrelhouse as a whole are a lost treasure. One of the sad facets about the infinite amount of new music the internet can provide is that not everyone gets the chance to get the recognition they deserve, especially so back in the MySpace days. In the digital-centric, streaming-friendly modern world you can easily cultivate a devoted fanbase, no matter how small, with your bedroom recordings and get them out on any major platform where they can be discovered by any; in the late 00s, you still needed the extra clout of a proper label backing you up to make the jump to to the more visible leagues. It's not something you think about that much until you discover an act who hit all the right boxes for you, but who you never see grow the audience you think they deserve. At the time of writing this I am the only person in Bandcamp who owns a copy of Friends and it's probably destined to live its life as a particularly obscure part of my library that I try to shove onto people where possible, and that's a little sad I guess. Friends is a great album in pretty much every regard: a characteristic style that sets it out from others of its genre, memorable instrumental performances and arrangements all across the board, Hanninen's vocals are full of quiet desperation that suit the sound, and the songs are excellent. The only complaint you could give it is that it's obviously a little rough around the edges, but at no point does it become a hindrance - you only wonder about the even greater heights these could reach with further polish. I don't think it'll ever get the retrospective recognition it deserves in my opinion but I am so glad it's finally out there, and most importantly, it's finally in in my music library.

Rating: 9/10

Manic Street Preachers - Forever Delayed: The Greatest Hits (2002)

1) A Design for Life; 2) Motorcycle Emptiness; 3) If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next; 4) La Tristesse Durera (Scream to a Sigh); 5) There By the Grace of God; 6) You Love Us; 7) Australia; 8) You Stole the Sun from My Heart; 9) Kevin Carter; 10) Tsunami; 11) The Masses Against the Classes; 12) From Despair to Where; 13) Door to the River; 14) Everything Must Go; 15) Faster; 16) Little Baby Nothing; 17) Suicide Is Painless (Theme from MASH); 18) So Why So Sad; 19) The Everlasting; 20) Motown Junk

The post career derail hits compilation!

Key tracks: I mean it's a hits compilation so technically everything, but "There By the Grace of God" and "Door to the River" deserve to be highlighted.

After the intentional brake-pull that the Manics caused with the less commercially instant Know Your Enemy, the clear follow-up move is... obviously a greatest hits compilation, for the label to get some cash in while the band's name is still somewhat relevant.

Summing up six albums within 80 minutes isn't a particularly easy task, especially given how varied the Manics' career had already been by this point - even if you limit yourself to just the singles. Forever Delayed mostly takes the predictable route and does pretty well with it all things considered. All the singles from Everything Must Go and This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours are here obviously, and they're accompanied by all the obvious favourites you'd expect to find here. The non-album singles "Suicide Is Painless", "Motown Junk" and "The Masses Against the Classes" have been included which is great both from a completionist point of view as well as convenient for fans. The fan and critic favourite The Holy Bible is represented by a single song in "Faster", which looks outrageous at first glance until you realise that trying to pretend the other singles from that album would fit within a hit compilation would constitute as an unbelievable act of self-delusion (and trying to squeeze in "Faster" alone with the rest of these songs stylistically was an impossible mission to start with, and it's really abrupt when it does appear). The exclusion of "Stay Beautiful" raises an eyebrow given how iconic it is, but admittedly the other Generation Terrorists cuts have an even more valid reason to be included. The only actual baffling matter is choosing "So Why So Sad" to be the only album to represent Know Your Enemy: I can get why only song would be taken from that record, but you have "Ocean Spray" right there to pick, i.e. the one thing close to a hit single and the one song the band regularly continue to play from the album live to this day.

But without the nitpicking, it does what a greatest hits collection should do: provide a snappy overview of the big successes and accompanying back catalogue colleagues to make for a good listen, and you could do a far worse of a job than this to entice you to explore the back catalogue further. The edits included here are downright painful in some cases ("Motorcycle Emptiness" being particularly egregious), but the songs themselves are fantastic and even if not fully representative of the band's first decade, they're a great snapshot.

That includes the token two new songs, because both "There By the Grace of God" and "Door to the River" are more than justified to be here. They are transitional songs, included here as a taste of things to come as the band would explore a more keyboard-driven, intricately produced direction up next, and so sound-wise they're something completely new rather than retreading past glories. But they're phenomenal teasers and rival many of the actual hit songs on this very record. The ethereal "There By the Grace of God" is one of the band's most subtly gorgeous, atmospheric songs, while "Door to the River" is overtly so: the former a haunting anthem that sounds resigned to an unknown bittersweet fate, the latter a grand string-laden tearjerker of a ballad with one of Wire's most poignant lyrics. They're masterful, far far away from the sort of throwaways that the mandatory new songs on hit compilations are associated with. If anything, it's a crime they're confined here because they really should have headed an album of their own.

Really, the only thing that holds this record back - besides the fact that it's a greatest hits compilation and not an actual album - is that it's outdated; not just because in the streaming era the idea of a single-disc career summation is a quaint antiquity, but because Manics themselves released another compilation later down the line which features all but one of the songs from here. The only reason I'm grading it an 8 instead of a 9 or even a 10 that it would deserve from an objective point of view is that I've never really formed any kind of relationship with this one: I was already way into the Manics rabbit hole by the time this was released and the edits kept me away from listening to this when I could just listen to the actual albums. It's an utilitarian rating. My copy is also the bog standard version. I would recommend any other completionist fan to dig a little deeper and find the deluxe 2-CD version which includes most of the remixes that had been scattered across the band's singles as b-sides in the prior decade, which does include some particularly good versions amongst the chaff.

Rating: 8/10