Manic Street Preachers - Postcards From a Young Man (2010)

1) (It’s Not War) Just the End of Love; 2) Postcards From a Young Man; 3) Some Kind of Nothingness; 4) The Descent (Pages 1 & 2); 5) Hazelton Avenue; 6) Auto-Intoxication; 7) Golden Platitudes; 8) I Think I Found It; 9) A Billion Balconies Under the Sun; 10) All We Make Is Entertainment; 11) The Future Has Been Here 4 Ever; 12) Don’t Be Evil

If at first you don't succeed, try again. Another album made to flirt with the charts, but this time the band actually care about what they're pushing out.

Key tracks: "Postcards From a Young Man", "Some Kind of Nothingness", "The Descent (Pages 1 & 2)"

Each Manic Street Preachers album since the 2000s tends to come with a tag line, courtesy of Nicky Wire's giant mouth: an outlandish phrase that he’d repeat over and over in interviews to describe the album, sometimes even including it in the press release. For Postcards From a Young Man, that tag line was that it was their “last shot at mass communication”. With 2007’s Send Away the Tigers the band had aimed to win back the hearts of the general populace and were briefly granted with their attention as its lead single "Your Love Alone Is Not Enough" became a minor hit, but the subsequent singles plummeted off the charts; for the follow-up album Journal for Plague Lovers they deliberately ignored the radio altogether, but their newly-found additional audience didn’t seem to miss them. The band still wanted to be popular again, but by this point a part of them had realised that perhaps they no longer had a place in what was popular and that trying to steer their career in that direction was a hopeless task. So, Postcards From a Young Man was to be the final gambit - another record with a more commercial sound, as one last attempt at becoming the people’s Manics again. If it wouldn’t stick, the band woved they would never try to seek chart success again.

Spoilers, it didn't work out - but the band were driven to try and pull it off. The general idea with Postcards From a Young Man is the same as it was with Send Away the Tigers, with big guitars and even bigger choruses leading the way. Compared to Send Away the Tigers, Postcards From a Young Man is a little more indulgent though: the string sections and other kitchen sink treatments are more prominent, a number of high profile guest stars appear (Ian McCulloch, Duff McKagan and John Cale all make an appearance), and most famously a gospel choir shadows the band across a selection of songs. There's an attempt to make something that's intentionally majestic and anthemic, like a victory lap without the prerequisite podium moment. The biggest difference between the two is that where Tigers was phlegmatic at best and cynical at worst, Postcards sounds a lot more sincere. Yes it's another intentional attempt to score a hit to stroke the band's egos, to be blunt, but the whole ride-or-die manifesto around it has made the band that much more invested in pulling it off - James especially sounds far more enthusiastic this time around, and Wire is downright glowing in his solo spot "The Future Has Been Here 4 Ever". There’s also a lot more variety to the songs, with even a few unexpected sidesteps that do not look directly to the past for inspiration. You could make an argument that Postcards is like what Tigers perhaps should have been from the get-go: the same ideas overall, but with some conviction and fresh ideas included.

This manifests more concretely in the simple, basic fact that Postcards has an overall better song selection than Tigers. Commercial isn’t necessarily a swear word and there’s nothing bad in a band playing up to tropes they know their way through inside and out even if they're a little too familiar, if you put your heart into it and focus. At worst, you could bark at the string-laden anthems in the vein of the title track, “The Descent” and the gospel-backed Ian McCulloch duet “Some Kind of Nothingness” as being very safe; but they are here to deliver massive, immediately resonant choruses and they do it so well it's hard not to get swept by the moment. The particularly important thing is that there’s some substance to them beyond the initial superficial gloss: “Postcards From a Young Man” is arguably the closest the band has gotten to when trying to rewrite the Everything Must Go anthems, “The Descent” has an unexpected regality to its coronal chorus that opts to slow things down and hammers its lush strings down to beautiful results, and “Some Kind of Nothingness” starts at 11 from the get-go and unashamedly delights in its bombast to the degree that it’s both ridiculous and genuinely good. It's not just done-and-gone recycling of old hit formulas, but thought has gone into how to represent the old tricks and give them a facelift, and most of the time it actually works. Most of the time: the lead single “(It’s Not War) Just the End of Love” is probably the band’s most inessential single, a thoroughly OK paint-by-numbers radio friendly unit shifter that’s most notable for Wire’s brief split-second vocal interjection cameo, which in itself is an attempt to replicate the similar moment from Tigers’ “Your Love Alone Is Not Enough”. It's almost sheepish compared to the next couple of tracks that throw in every kitchen sink in the shop, and the difference in how well the songs hit their aimed targets is like night and day between them.

The early-album trio of songs is Postcards boiled down to its purest essence but the band stretch themselves to a reasonable degree across the record and it’s what keeps the album interesting; as much as the album is supposed to be pandering towards their most popular sound, the trio take the time to dip their toes in some different waters, and often towards sunnier places that play against the band's type. Case in point, the super-upbeat, mandolin-featuring “I Think I Found It” - an absurdly happy pop ditty that’s so completely opposite to so much of the band’s history that it’s a shocker at first, but against all odds it works. The same positivty also shines across other tentative summer anthems like the smooth and string-laden “Hazelton Avenue” and the Wire-fronted singalong jam “The Future Has Been Here 4 Ever” - and the happiness sounds real, the musical equivalent of simply having a really good day when nothing goes wrong. The gospel-tinged “Golden Platitudes” on the other hand is slow and contemplative but similarly sincere, and as per its sound it's the natural high point of the choir who regularly appear across the record. The much-touted choir made for a big part of the album's promotional soundbites as an easy thing to point out when highlighting the album's boisterous direction, but for most part of the album it simply acts as an intensely amplified backing vocal harmony whenever they appear - a production element among many that fades between other similarly used elements, rather than helping to establish the album's identity. On "Golden Platitudes" though, the choir gets a chance to breathe within the song's space and contributes greatly to the song’s overall arrangement and feel.

The differences between how Send Away the Tigers and Postcards From a Young Man approach the same basic concept are most apparent when you consider the parts of the tracklist that’s closest to Tigers' balls-to-the-walls scattershot rock - because that’s still somehow persistent here too, likely as a nod to the people who may have picked up Tigers during its brief chart run. The ‘old man Wire yells at cloud technology’ trilogy “All We Make Is Entertainment”, “A Billion Balconies Under the Sun” and “Don’t Be Evil” do away with most of the album’s excess and replace with an added guitar crunch, but also throw away the bright excitement at the same time; albeit “Don’t Be Evil” and its hand-clap heavy chorus does manage to salvage some points by its end. For all their brimstone and bluster they’re largely bland and uninteresting, much in the same way this exact kind of material was on Send Away the Tigers. The annoying thing is that Journal for Plague Lovers showed that Manics absolutely can rock out still, but its lessons fell to deaf ears; apart from “Auto-Intoxication”, the most interesting out of all the more guitar-focused songs and which, with its fractured structure and blustering chorus, comes closest to the band applying the sound of Journal for Plague Lovers and translating it to a more polished sound.

The truth is that Postcards From a Young Man isn’t the most creatively exciting Manics album, and I don't think even the band would challenge that: in a trilogy of albums on very specific missions, this is the one that's most deliberate in how it plays its cards, and also sounds the most polished and yes, safest. Even at its best, it doesn't sound necessary - if you plucked this out of the discography forevermore, I don't think anyone would be truly heartbroken. But the songs it packs within are for the most part very enjoyable, simple as that. I've tried to challenge them because somewhere in my deepest parts I'm pettily grumpy about the band going on a wild goose chase while snubbing what I love about the albums of theirs that mean the most to me - but I enjoy listening to most of these songs, and the years have been surprisingly kind to them. The fact that it rails so hard down on its chosen route is ultimately for the benefit of Postcards, because it translates as some investment and inspiration towards the songs, which in return fills them with a creative spark that was missing from Send Away the Tigers. Postcards sounds like it does mean something to the people that made it, and is not just a checkbox exercise. Crucially, it sounds like they all had fun doing it: the (over)indulgence in all the production elements has given the band the opportunity to strip away some of the self-seriousness they've carried around for a while now and even if they could have used those elements more elaborately, there's a Queen-like giddiness to the pomp and bombast

As mentioned earlier, the Manics failed to meet the mission parameters they set for the album - the charts had moved on and a veteran rock band was no longer something that fit in that world. It turned out to be a good thing because for once the band kept their promise, and for the next few albums they would return to a mindset where they recorded music just for them, with no external audience in mind, and it would be a creative return to form. And still, it seems unfair that the lasting legacy of Postcards From a Young Man is that it was the death knell to one particular chapter of the band. It paints it as a failure, when in reality it's more of a secret success: the proof that the Manics could aim for a more intentionally commercial sound while still retaining some quality control and trying a few new things while at it.

Rating: 7/10