1) Futurology; 2) Walk Me to the Bridge; 3) Let's Go to War; 4) The Next Jet to Leave Moscow; 5) Europa Geht Durch Mich (feat. Nina Hoss); 6) Divine Youth (feat. Georgia Ruth Williams); 7) Sex, Power, Love and Money; 8) Dreaming a City (Hugheskova); 9) Black Square; 10) Between the Clock and the Bed (feat. Green Gartside); 11) Misguided Missile; 12) The View From Stow Hill; 13) Mayakovsky
Deluxe Edition Bonus Disc: Original demos: 1) Futurology; 2) Walk Me to the Bridge; 3) Let's Go to War; 4) The Next Jet to Leave Moscow; 5) Europa Geht Durch Mich; 6) Divine Youth; 7) Sex, Power, Love and Money; 8) Dreaming a City (Hugheskova); 9) Black Square; 10) Between the Clock and the Bed; 11) Misguided Missile; 12) The View From Stow Hill; 13) Mayakovsky Bonus tracks: 14) Blistered Mirrors; 15) Empty Motorcade; 16) The Last Time I Saw Paris
German roads gave the Manic Street Preachers a vision of the way forward, and have revitalised their creativity.
Key tracks: "Futurology", "Europa Geht Durch Mich", "The View From Stow Hill"
I've been making a concentrated effort to review the Manic Street Preachers back catalogue over the past few months, mostly in order of release. I've done this sort of chronological blitz through the band's back catalogue a few times over the years - not counting listening to these albums as and when they came out - and I'm sharing this behind-the-scenes glimpse here because going through the records in order always makes Futurology's position in that line-up clear, and it's hard not to think about the album with that in mind. While there's an obvious personal bias (call it nostalgia if you will) factor to how I value the band's first seven albums so highly, they were all also products of the band operating ahead without fear; they've never been the most challenging band, but during that initial stretch of albums they were frequently challenging themselves and introducing new ideas. In the late 2000s that fizzled out to some degreee and the band started to tread on eggshells, operating a little too safely in a particular musical space they had degreed their comfort zone. I bring this up (once more, if you've stumbled into this review after the others) because it's actually relevant here instead of an aging fan complaining, and 2013's Rewind the Film showed the signs of Manics correcting their course. It contained traces of the same spirit and modus operandi that the band's first decade and a half had, with signs pointing towards the trio realising that something had happened to their sense of adventure and maybe breaking out of that comfort zone was necessary again. And if Rewind the Film was the promise being made, then Futurology is where they held true to it.
As the story goes, the origin of Futurology is tied in with that of Rewind the Film, with the two albums coming out of the same sessions and split into two separately released chapters. Neither of them are an afterthought, and I strongly believe the band when they've said they were on a creative high to a point where two separate albums were a legit possibility. And still, Futurology gives the impression that this is what they were originally moving towards before Rewind the Film started to rear its head along the way. That album spread its wings surprisingly wide around its acoustic base concept (less charitable would call it ‘slightly incohesive’ but that’s too negative) almost as if the original idea wasn't quite enough to make up a full record. Compare this to Futurology, which is a traditionally meticulously planned Manics album through and through, with a firm musical concept and a high-design visual theme to go with it, both of which you could distill into a Nicky Wire promotional tagline. It’s too much to just be one half of one period and the way its sound bled to Rewind the Film at places indicates as much. It's almost a high level concept album, the kind of thing that passion projects are sparked out of when someone gets an idea into their head they just can't shake - and it would go a long way to explain how invested the band sound in it.
It's impossible to convey just in words how rejuvenated and new the Manics sound on Futurology. If there's an overarching theme to the album that overshadows all the other running themes through it, it's that of the Manics throwing their previous rulesets into the recycling bin and following their whims to places they may have felt too reserved to go to across the past few albums. The twist is how it manifests in the strangest way - besides the obvious differences in sound (and we'll get to that in a minute) Futurology is one of the few times where the band have really leaned against their offbeat sense of humour. Where Rewind the Film was a sad album of middle-age depression and loneliness, Futurology is a cheeky bastard. Wire has said the album is the most optimistic album they've made and despite the usual Manics lyrical tropes rearing their head (war, alienation, despair, the lot) the band are having fun with them to an almost self-aware fashion. Wire is still in an introspective mode following Rewind the Film but he's no longer completely defeated by his demons, and either spends time reflecting on them with insight or even actively snarking at himself. In a delightfully twisted way it's a joyous album, and that odd positivity is reflected in the wild adventurousness of the record. Its curveballs are full of the kind of free-spirited levity that the Manics have mostly hidden in their b-sides in the past - now it's coming out in broad daylight and Futurology revels in it.
To match this, the subdued and largely acoustic fields of Rewind the Film are gone and in their place are mirror-glad skyscrapers and modernist angles. Futurology is a sharp, dynamic album that rushes forward while looking forward as per its title, the band making a ruckus with Bradfield's guitars in lead after they had been quieted down for Rewind the Film, with programmed elements and synthesizers intermingling at every step. Manics have dabbled with electronic elements in the past but in more introspective settings; this is the first time they find their way into the band's favoured mode of bold guitar rock. There's an abstract European, and more specifically German, influence to it - it was recorded in Berlin (and the band were very self-aware how it was their "Berlin album") and inspired by their travels across Europe and the sense of escapism they associate with the continent. There's a kind of propulsive, repetitive rhythm to most tracks that could vaguely be associated with krautrock motoriks, while the synthesized elements together with the live band dynamic bring forth associations with other famous Berlin-based experiments across rock history. The band hired Alex Silva as the producer, who they had previously worked with on The Holy Bible, and while the two albums are sonically worlds apart, Silva brings out the same kind of zealous drive from the band to Futurology: like The Holy Bible, Futurology is an album guided very clearly by a particular vision and everyone involved is throwing in everything they have to get that vision turned into reality. There's parts of the album where the lines between a "rock" album and something else start to blur and veer across to something subtler and stranger, and yet it still comes off louder and more bolsterous than many of the Manics albums that deliberately tried to tap into those rock and roll ideals directly. This in practice means that the band's strengths are in full display but with a new set of clothes on, which the title track at the start so strongly shows: "Futurology" is a traditional Manics anthem at heart but with a new paint coat over it and a brandy lit fire under its belly that makes it a propulsive, earnest manifesto for the record. It's an opener that sounds better each time you hear it, because the way it runs through the album's ideas becomes more and more evident the more you hear it start the journey.
The title track also features Wire singing its towering stadium-ready chorus, his rough voice bringing a hint of vulnerability to the lining of the song - it's his first time (outside his solo songs) leading the chorus of a Manics song, and a single at that, after so many cameos and verse trade-offs with Bradfield. The experimenting around Bradfield taking a backseat in lead vocals that was first shown on Rewind the Film continues its casual development here, but you could easily argue that the whole premise has been realised better this time around: or in other words, the other vocals are now used to augment James rather than replace him outright. Wire doesn’t get any solo songs (unless you count the seemingly unscripted shouting in the otherwise instrumental “Mayakovsky”) but his supporting vocal spots are prominent and play off Bradfield's lead vocals excellently, two songs feature choirs (a proper one in “Misguided Missile” and a gathering of studio visitors in “Let’s Go to War”) to give Bradfield a boost from the behind, and where the guest vocal spots are back they’re not obscuring James completely. The three songs with featured vocalists are all clear duets this time, with Bradfield and the collaborators exchanging lines between one another and sharing equal parts of the songs' weights. The co-headliners are overall great as well and probably even better utilised than on Rewind the Film which already did a great job with it, with Georgia Ruth Williams lending a tenderness to the contemplative slow cut “Divine Youth” that contrasts with James’ stadium-ready vocals and Green Gartside’s very distinctive nasal tone working in tandem with the general dreamland surreality of “Between the Clock and the Bed”.
And then there’s “Europa Geht Durch Mich”, the album’s unofficial theme song and the epitome of the record’s fixation with its country of recording. It’s a ridiculous song, and there’s no better way to describe it: built upon a hulking stomp that sounds like someone is pounding an industrial complex, it’s lead by what sounds like an air raid siren and culminates in the German actress Nina Hoss sing-shouting taglines about Europe in German. It’s somewhere between krautrock and industrial dance clubs, and it’s absolutely not the work of people who take themselves Very Very Seriously. And that’s why it’s so great, and there’s no better song to tie the album together - literally, as echoes of it cameo across the album’s length. There’s an irreverence to it that’s not entirely unlike the antagonising wink-wink posturing of Generation Terrorists or the more chaotic parts of Know Your Enemy, but reinterpreted by a group of veteran musicians on a road trip across some fantasy Europe. That off-kilterness isn't just restricted to "Europa Geht Durch Mich" either - the sci-fi secret agent theme "Dreaming a City" that's so unlike any other Manics instrumental so far (and easily the best one they've released by this point), the bitterly gleeful group chorus of “Let’s Go to War” that marches onto death with a smile on its face and the completely bonkers futuristic disco-rock of “Sex, Power, Love & Money” are things that are hard to believe they exist after years of the band taking themselves very seriously on record.
Futurology isn't all absurd style experiments and studio curios, and between the lines there's an honest and serious Manic Street Preachers album waiting to emerge. The likes of "The Next Jet to Leave Moscow", "Black Square" and "Futurology" are timeless Manics songs, but now playing around with the same risk-embracing attitude as the rest of the album. “Walk Me to the Bridge” is a standard straight-to-point latter-day Manics lead single but this time it's genuinely exciting and continues to be just as thrilling and refreshing no matter how many times you hear it, with a fantastic, almost menacing bass-driven structure that explodes into a blitz of synths in its chorus. That continuous sense of freshness and excitement runs across throughout, sometimes for the simple reason that the band are hitting all the exact right notes you look for in their music, like with the propulsive and beautifully sarcastic "The Next Jet to Leave Moscow", the soaring title track or the undeniably massive "Misguided Missile" where the finale - choirs blowing and all - sounds immense in a nigh-physically moving way. Other times it's in the sense of discovery within the deep production layers, reminiscent of prior richly immersive albums like Lifeblood and This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours - "Between the Clock and the Bed" loops and swirls around beautifully, and the layers of the brilliant "Black Square" hide little secrets in some of the album's strongest melodies, culminating in a breakdown that literally breaks the body of the song away for a moment of chaotic rush before the chorus hits again stronger than ever. The half-acoustic half-electronic "The View From Stow Hill" not just bridges the two sibling albums together, but it radiates the classic beautiful melancholy that the band have always mastered and knocks it out of the park so well that even Wire namedropping Twitter and Facebook in the lyrics manages to sound decent. It's a beautiful song with a particularly resonant chorus melody, and ranks among the band's best album closers - or it would, if "Mayakovsky" wouldn't burst through the door like Kramer and rowdily thrash around the room. Futurology is a cheeky album, and it does not want you to forget about that right as you imagine the record is about to end in a genuinely poignant note.
It's a baffling but genuinely rather fun way to end the album and even after you've gotten used to it and know it's coming, it still feels like a surprise every time it appears - just like "Futurology" feels more resonant each time it starts the album and never loses its freshness. The disparate parts of Futurology could come loose at any moment but the Manics hold them down through a very strong vision for what they've set out to do, and the earnest willingness to take risks along the way which pays off fantastically. To go back on my personal experiences - and this is my review so I can - the great triumph of Futurology is that it's so clearly reminiscent of the band's golden years in its vigour, creativity and spirit; it reminds me of the Manics I was obsessed with and like that particular iteration of band has returned after a period where it felt like they were in danger of becoming another veteran band releasing good but inessential records to pad out their catalogue for fans only. But Futurology is anything but padding: it's a creative resurrection and revitalisation that builds on the potential that Rewind the Film hinted at, in a way that is downright joyous from fan's perspective but doesn't need that stamp of approval to stand up, because it's consistently exciting just from the point of view of a fan of music in general. Futurology features Manics' best songwriting in years, a style of production and choice of soundworld that brings the best out of those melodies and gives them to kick to send them soaring, and it's a return of the attitude the band had when they were on their peak. Twelve albums in and hitting their third decade, here the Manics sound as thrilling and vital as they've ever been in their prime. As the title track states: "we'll come back one day - we never really went away".
The deluxe edition offers the standard demo versions: no hidden secrets this time, just a few extra Wire lead vocals, a fully English-language version "Europa Geht Durch Mich" and a couple of takes with just James and his guitar (and occasionally a drum machine), otherwise it's mainly rougher takes and some surprisingly finished versions that are 90% close to the final version. The three bonus studio tracks are the more exciting thing, as the band had started to ween away from strict singles and b-sides at this stage and bonus drops like this have replaced them. "Blistered Mirrors" occupies the sort of halfway point between Rewind the Film and Futurology that most of the non-album tracks from these two eras exist in, and is the weakest of the lot to the point that there's not much to say about it. "The Last Time I Saw Paris" is the closest to the main album in its Euro-fetishism and guest vocals, with an uncredited vocalist (who I believe might be James' wife) providing spoken word narration across a sweeping cinematic backing. And while it's really neat and wonderfully lush, the award goes to "Empty Motorcade" - full of urgency as it speeds down the highway on its part-programmed rhythm, running on the main album's dynamics and escalating into a chorus that some would say is too good for a bonus track.
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