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.
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