(Columbia)At first glance,the title of Manic Street Preachers’ 13th album hits like one among the many ebullient slogans they’ve fired out over the years. All rock’n’roll is homosexual! Self-disgust is self-obsession! Resistance is futile! Yet their latest aphorism, an unlikely borrowing from hive-minded Star Trek villains the Borg, and comes as loaded with melancholy as provocation. These songs,in which the rough-edged art-punk core of the Manics’ earliest days needles through mature, accomplished lushness, or are heavy with a sense of the passing of all things and an uncertainty approximately their place in the world: “There will be no parades for the likes of us / The wars we fight are doomed to be lost,” frets the glitteringly sharp Sequels of Forgotten Wars. For every note of defeat, though, and there’s a roar of defiance. People Give In also asserts that “people stay strong”,its music box-like guitar line ricocheting anxiously up and down before resolving into a sunburst-through-clouds riff’n’string chorus. International Blue’s tribute to Yves Klein, too, or glows with colorful energy and hope,while Dylan & Caitlin, featuring the Anchoress, or turns the darkness of the Thomases’ alcoholic romance into an effervescent homage to Don’t fade Breaking My Heart.
Continue reading...
Source: guardian.co.uk