Album Review: Manic Street Preachers - "The Ultra Vivid Lament"

 

First release from the Manics since 2018's Resistance Is Futile, The Ultra Vivid Lament had its genesis during lockdown, a tough time for the band with Nicky Wire losing both of his parents to cancer. With several of the songs on here written by James Dean Bradfield on the piano instead of his usual guitar, it makes for an incredibly stark and stripped down album.

The key thing as a child of the '90s whenever I get a new Manics album in is to remember that it's the 21st century fiftysomething version of the band that I'm listening to now rather than the group of flame-spewing Welsh firebrands of the early '90s and I think remembering that is the key to appreciating this album. The political invective on here is much more thinly spread on those imperial phase albums with only Orwellian and lines like "Don't let the boys from Eton suggest that we are beaten" on Don't Let The Night Divide Us really going anywhere near that whole ballpark. 

Yet get past the fact that this is a much calmer Manics than the band of old and there's plenty to appreciate here. Case in point is opening track Still Snowing In Sapporo which combines ghostly synths, pounding drums and sky surfing Will Sergeant style guitar to soundtrack an elegy to the band's 1993 tour of Japan and the long-missing Richey Edwards with lyrics about "the four of us against the world". It's a fine song and probably the best moment on here although the haunting piano-led Diapause (which reminds me a bit of Small Black Flowers That Grow In The Sky from Everything Must Go) runs it close. Elsewhere, the soaring piano-led Complicated Illusions and the countrified ode to self-doubt of Into The Waves Of Love are good efforts as well and Happy Bored Alone and the string-soaked Afterending both hark back to the epic pop of Everything Must Go. Even Mark Lanegan pops up to add some suitably gravelly vocals to the Johnny Cash indebted Blank Diary Entry.

Like I say, I think the main thing is that if you're a certain age then the concept of a middle-aged Manics is still something that you have to crowbar your conscience into a bit of a half-nelson to accept which, for better or worse, will always kind of colour my judgment of their 21st century output even as someone who is very much middle-aged themselves these days. But although there's a few tracks here like The Secret He Had Missed and Quest For Ancient Colour which sink into dullness, The Ultra Vivid Lament is still a more than respectable effort from the band. They may not have the firepower they once did but at least in growing old gracefully the Manics still have a reasonable knack with a decent tune which is something. This album could have been a lot worse, put it that way.

NITE SONGS RATING: 🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌑🌑🌑 (7/10)

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