It’s an era in which any performer – be they novice beatmakers hacking tunes out of a stolen laptop or grand old dames of rock like the Manic Street Preachers – must spend at least some of their time thinking and talking about identity.
As the Internet’s vast intellect makes us dumber (the opposite of the emancipatory effect of libraries the Welshmen celebrated in their finest hour) our entire existence seems to be being rendered down to a few homogeneous lumps of top line ephemera masquerading as culture; freedom of thought now means little more than operating dangerously at the margins in modern society.
Never more than fully immersed in this uncivil war of sensibilities, the Manic Street Preachers have never really gone in for assuming a new posture every time they meet their public again, although in the past they’ve taken leopard print punk, stadium monolithics and, on their last album Futurology, even krautrock into a stable brimming with ideas and also cautious, paternalistic socialism with the smallest of S’s.
And yet, from the opening note of Resistance Is Futile’s lead single International Blue, it is utterly doubtless who its creators are; a signature guitar peal from James Dean Bradfield begging recognition whether you’re in Taipei or Tallahassee. In the past, even when pointing somewhere directly towards the mainstream (most recently on Send Away The Tigers), there was always a feeling that one or two fist-pumping valedictories like this would be your lot, the band’s natural exuberance kept in check by a need to find a deeper sense of meaning. Dogged, however, in the run up by self-doubt about their ongoing relevance in a market of diminishing returns, on their thirteenth album they surrender to becoming the band everyone wants them to be.
The process wasn’t without guilt; few if any groups suffer more from the complexity of their heritage. But after a four-year sabbatical (in part due to the demolition of their old studio) the jigsaw pieces fall into a collection of almost constant peak. This occasionally takes them to some unaccustomed – and brave – places, such as on a homage to the adulterous playwriter Dylan Thomas and his wife Caitlin which for one reason or another sounds akin to The Beautiful South’s kitchen sink pathos, but the direct corollary is found on the likes of Secrets Of Forgotten Wars, which rolls up every sinew of their imperial periods and unleashes a devastating chorus in which Bradfield growls, “We’ve nowhere to go…from rock n’ roll”.
It’s part of a second half which is as all killer, no filler as could never have been predicted. Liverpool Revisited, which proceeds it, is a love letter to the city which has, like the band, suffered some slings and arrows of outrageous fortune but kept on keeping on, whilst the opposite bookmark Hold Me Like A Heaven threads harmonies like waving banners, the result a wonderful kitchen sink of emotional overload in shades of soul and country, embracing pop as both an ideal and a real destination.
What’s the difference? In some respects nothing: the words are still about things that this band care about, mostly expressed at a tangent to the subject itself. The switch is in the fresh gasp of vitality they’ve discovered, an enthusiasm that keeps closing pair Song For The Sadness and The Left Behind as extrovert and kinetically charged with this brio right to the end.
Resistance Is Futile is that oddest of things, a genuine stab at temporarily recapturing the former glories earned as the nation’s least likely favourite purveyors of conscience. The Manic Street Preachers will undoubtedly subside/invert/retake their moral high ground again (insert your preferred option) but it would be hard here to think of a more positive, direct and gone for broke execution.
If an identity is nothing more than a straitjacket, you might as well get one that fits.
