1) This Sullen Welsh Heart (feat. Lucy Rose); 2) Show Me the Wonder; 3) Rewind the Film (feat. Richard Hawley); 4) Builder of Routines; 5) 4 Lonely Roads (feat. Cate Le Bon); 6) (I Miss The) Tokyo Skyline; 7) Anthem for a Lost Cause; 8) As Holy as the Soil (That Buries Your Skin); 9) 3 Ways to See Despair; 10) Running Out of Fantasy; 11) Manorbier; 12) 30-Year War
Deluxe Edition Bonus Disc: Original Demos: 1) This Sullen Welsh Heart; 2) Show Me the Wonder; 3) Rewind the Film; 4) Builder of Routines; 5) 4 Lonely Roads; 6) (I Miss The) Tokyo Skyline; 7) Anthem for a Lost Cause; 8) As Holy as the Soil (That Buries Your Skin); 9) 3 Ways to See Despair; 10) Running Out of Fantasy; 11) Manorbier; 12) 30-Year War; Live at the O2, 2011 13) There By the Grace of God; 14) Stay Beautiful; 15) Your Love Alone Is Not Enough; 16) The Love of Richard Nixon; 17) Revol
The first signs of a creative rebirth - Wire's introspection meets the band trying on a more acoustic route.
Key tracks: "This Sullen Welsh Heart", "Rewind the Film", "Builder of Routines"
A long-recurring piece of Manic Street Preachers mythology has been the idea of an acoustic album. It was something that had been haunting the back the band’s mind for years and years, frequently reappearing as an aside n in interviews and potentially initiated a couple of times across the band’s history, but it always either fell on the wayside or transformed quickly into a different direction. James Dean Bradfield in particular had been namedropping Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska for years as an inspiration, but by the time the band had entered their third decade of activity the concept seemed to be on its way to be a piece of fan lore, and nothing tangible. But then, following the failed “last shot at mass communication” of Postcards From a Young Man the band took a break and when they reconvened, they (for once) kept true to their promise of not trying to repeat that same bag of tricks again. The recording sessions for the new album had no greater plan or focus, but they turned out to be extremely fertile - so much so that the band realised they had a lot more songs than they knew what to do with. Two clear directions to take were starting to pop out of the overall wealth of material, and the decision was made to create two albums. The selection of the less electrified, contemplative songs became the heart of Rewind the Film, the first of the duology - and through that, the band finally seized the chance of realising one of their long-ignored plans.
Rewind the Film isn’t Nebraska by a long shot and it's not even near to any kind of intimate collection of campfire songs, but it’s the closest the band has been to the concept of an album built around acoustic instruments. A good half of the songs feature veritably rich arrangements (in particular the symphonic title track which rides on a layered David Axelrod sample), while others heavily feature programmed elements that bridge the gap between this and the more electronic Futurology, the second album still to come. The acoustic aspect has mainly been restricted to James’ choice of guitars, and even then his electric guitar hasn’t been banned completely - its appearance has simply been restricted to a couple of guest spots where its sudden appearance makes the most impact. This may not sound like much but Manic Street Preachers have been recognisable throughout their history by Bradfield’s electric guitar sound and the riffs and solos that come with it, and so their absence is immediately notable. Taking things further, Bradfield doesn’t try to raise his acoustic guitar as a replacement lead either, and there isn't any particular defining element in the album's soundscape as a result. For an album where the basic description sounds like it could be a one-thing shtick, it’s anything but: the songs vary significantly from one to the next, from intimate confessionals to busy electronic soundscapes and would-be rock songs that have been forced to sit down for a second.
Coinciding with moving himself away from the spotlight instrumentally, Rewind the Film overall - and intentionally - diminishes Bradfield's general leading role. At the time Bradfield confessed that he was bored of his own voice, that after so many years of dominating the microphone he felt like the band needed something or someone else to freshen things up. While Nicky Wire had become a more regular feature on the studio albums, he was never going to take the lead to any larger degree; and so the band were inspired to invite other vocalists in the studio. There’s three guest spots across Rewind the Film and together they run the whole gamut of features: Lucy Rose mainly works background vocals on “This Sullen Welsh Heart”, the Richard Hawley-featuring title track is a full duet between him and Bradfield, and most strikingly Cate Le Bon is the de facto lead on “4 Lonely Roads”. With one Wire song ("As Holy as the Soil") and one instrumental (“Manorbier”), Bradfield is wholly or partially absent for nearly half the album, which takes a while to get used to but proves out to be a successful trick. Manics for certain aren’t in need of a new vocalist and Bradfield's vocals aren't in the danger of sounding stale, but the guests are a perfect fit to the album’s sound world. All three have a significant presence and audible chemistry with the material presented, and they suit their respective songs perfectly. Rose’s gentle voice works gorgeously against James’ in the quiet opener “This Sullen Welsh Heart”, Hawley’s dramatic baritone is right at home against the exploding orchestras and keyboards of “Rewind the Film” and Le Bon’s calm delivery is a natural fit to the relaxed stroll of “4 Lonely Roads”. You can tell their contributions are a success because you don't actually miss Bradfield for the time they're on centre stage, and the band have created something new out of it. Apart from “Little Baby Nothing” way back in the day, Manics’ few duet spots across the years have been afterthoughts, collaborations placed on top of songs that weren't meant to be duets; here it sounds like the band wrote the songs with their guests in mind, even if that isn't necessarily the reality. That's what makes their sudden appearance work.
The stronger presence of people outside to the band runs somewhat counterpoint to the album's general themes, because in terms of its content Rewind the Film is Wire’s most personal and directly confessional record yet, and it is a sad album. Wire had previously described Lifeblood as “The Holy Bible for 35-year olds”, but this is closer to that parallel; one man soaking the songs with his own psychoanalysis, this time obsessed with reflecting on the past. It's an album about aging, painful nostalgia, old failures and the never-ending worry that it's too late to fix things up, and desperately holding onto the few pieces of your life that grant the familiar safety to retreat into. Wire starts the record with "I don't want my children to grow up like me", takes time to admit he's "so sick and so tired of being 4 real", defeatedly admits "I am no longer the centre of the universe" in a way that trashes his legendary rock and roll id, and runs away hiding in childhood memories on the title track. Where the music flutters and blusters in order to counter the standard associations with acoustic albums and sounds thoroughly ecstatic at times, Wire's lyrics are one melancholy verse after another, retreating further to his own shell. The scattering of songs that are on a different tract barely feel like distractions: "Show Me the Wonder" sounds defiant but now and then throws a line that questions its own boldness to tackle itself, "Tokyo Skyline" is a genuine love letter to Japan and yet is all but blatant about how it's an escapist fantasy for Wire to escape to, and "30-Year War" simply switches the melancholy to anger as the personal moves to political. Wire's been introspective before but Rewind the Film is straight soul-purging more often than it's not and it's oddly harrowing, especially when it's sung by other people; it's hard to grasp just how depressing the album really is when the attention is mostly on the sudden new sounds that allow the songs to hide their real nature.
The thing is - and I'm sorry to keep the sad artisté cliché alive and well - Wire's introspective moments have often coincided with creative musical peaks for the band and once again his melancholy has heralded the trio finding the right direction again. After the mass communication wilderness years of the past three albums, the band were in a desperate need of rerouting, and Rewind the Film a realisation - albeit not a flawless one - of the promises the band made after the chart-seeking years fizzled out to their end. It's an album that looks somewhere new for the group and doesn't abide to any strictly set doctrine of how the band should represent themselves, and for the first time in a while it feels like the band just allowed themselves to create without ulterior motives. In other words, despite its placid nature Rewind the Film is thoroughly exciting, and that often directly translates to the music being excellent. Even though the album attempts to bare things down at places, it's especially the parts where Rewind the Film shows its flair a little that come alive well and truly. The busy electronic skittering against the scene-setting violin of "Tokyo Skyline" sounds genuinely giddy, the brief horn outro for "Builder of Routines" is a drop-dead gorgeous finale for the slowly intensifying song and you wish it would last so much longer (alongside the rest of the song), and the heftly layered part-sample backdrop for "Rewind the Film" is sweepingly cinematic. Moving away from guitar solos and the need to write constant anthems has revitalised the band's creative spree so you get more variety, more twists, more sudden moments that you love to point out. Wire's melancholy may dominate the album lyrically but around it, the band have created a very varied and often surprising album that is practically undersold by its "acoustic album" reputation. Not that it couldn't have been just as good had it been more restrained: "Running Out of Fantasy" and "This Sullen Welsh Heart" are fantastic proof that James requires very little around his songs to make something great, and especially "This Sullen Welsh Heart" is among one of James' best solo spots and opens the album wonderfully. Similarly, the album closes excellently: as the atmospheric instrumental "Manorbier" wonderfully bridges the acoustic sound into the aggravated electro-stomper "30-Year War", moving from Wire's internal politics to very blatantly the external and with the rage to boot, the album as a whole looks forward, showing yet another new aspect of itself while linking it to Futurology. It's a transition between two separate pairs that do not need the context to work, but the inherent qualities of which are amplified by the meta aspect.
There's a few areas where Rewind the Film falters. "Show Me the Wonder" is the obligatory single that Bradfield is bound to write under some ancient oath; the radio single that somewhat undersells the main album is the main carryover from the previous albums and a hard habit for the band to shake, and despite its eventually poignant verses and the bright horns that the song rides its hooks on, it grinds to a halt in its thumping chorus and its perky retro-styling feels at odds with the rest of the album. "3 Ways to See Despair", one of the few songs featuring James' faithful electric guitar, is the opposite as it takes an intentional stab to pair Wire's lyrics with the musical tone to match, and comes off anvilicious in its emotional heaviness - a try-hard dark night of the soul that ends up being a little corny instead. "As Holy as the Soil" is the least abrupt of the lot but it's like an awkward Sunday school original, going for a light gospel twang that maybe would have worked on Postcards From a Young Man but here is clear filler even if boasts the only Wire-vocal. The silver lining here is that part of why these songs stand up so clumsily is because the rest of the album is so well put together and natural in its skin; so the weak spots are the ones that either feel like leftovers from prior ideas or attempts to intentionally match a set tone and mood.When directly comparing it to its sibling album, you get the slight feeling that the initial batch of songs that lead to Rewind the Film were the minority of the session material and that's why you get a few songs where the lines blur between the two albums, and another couple of songs like these that probably would have ended up as b-sides if not for a need to bulk the record up a little bit more.
But the one big takeaway from Rewind the Film is that at its brightest it shines so well. It's amusing to describe a largely calm, collected and aching album as a revitalising jolt but it's exactly what Rewind the Film is - for the band and the listener. It's an audible document of the Manics brushing off the self-inflicted awkwardness of their previous years, and with that, they sound like themselves again: fearless and invested. I don't dislike the 2007-2010 period as much it seems like I do (and Journal for Plague Lovers right in the middle of it is the odd one out that doesn't quite fit in with the main criticisms I have of those years), but for the most parts it saw the Manics putting on a role and colouring by numbers, and it lacked that unpredictability the Manics had always treasured. Rewind the Film brings that spirit back again and comfortably slots in the continuum, like it had never gone away and the past couple of albums were a dream. I hate the phrase "return to form" because it implies artists should stick to their past and not take risks changing, but Rewind the Film is that risk after a series of safe bets. It's a case where that phrase really feels like it applies, because it's back to the most important aspect of the past greats: it's an album where it's clear the band put their conviction into it.
The now-standard deluxe edition of the album comes with the now-standard bonus disc of original demos and few other goodies. The demos are fine but not too interesting for the most parts - most of the songs are already fully realised and there's no interesting sketches, rather it's just rougher versions of the album tracks with placeholders over future production elements (keyboards instead of horns, etc). You can get a hint of the barebones Nebraska version album through some of them and have an idea of what it would've sounded like, but for most parts it's clear these songs were intended to be fuller works to start with. Few interesting details still remain: "Rewind the Film" and "4 Lonely Roads" feature Wire in vocals, a child choir comes out of nowhere on "3 Ways to See Despair" (and axing it was the right choice but I did not expect a child choir to appear in a demo), and the version of "30-Year War" gives an idea of what a true Rewind the Film-version of the song would have sounded like, as opposed to the duology hybrid of the album version. Far more interesting are the live songs. Capping off the hit-chasing years, the band released the singles collection National Treasures in 2011 and closed off the era with a residency at the O2 in London, playing every one of those singles. Including the ones they've deliberately ignored for years. A live album never realised and instead the band provided bulk of the gig through b-sides, free downloads and bonus material like this; and the great thing is that they didn't shy away from releasing some of the less obvious songs this way. We may never get the full gig but I'm glad we have the excellent recordings of "There By the Grace of God" and "The Love of Richard Nixon", dusted off for one night and probably never to be heard again. "Stay Beautiful" is great fun live with a full stadium audience screaming the lyrics at the band, "Revol" comes back with a vengeance with some muscle and, uh, "Your Love Alone Is Not Enough" is there and the combined charisma of Nina Persson and Bradfield still can't save it. If you're cobbling together your own live album like I am the deluxe version is sort of worth it, but the demos aren't particularly interesting this time around just due to the nature of the album.
No comments:
Post a Comment