Intriguingly, ‘Rewind The Film‘ is the result of an abundance of material recorded during sessions at Faster studios, as well as at the famous RockField studios, with producer Alex Silva – one of two records that have been constructed and described, by the band, as being part of a two pronged assault in the final phase of the history of the Manic Street Preachers.
To all intents and purposes, the album deals with themes which do not deviate too far beyond their usual bag of muses; mainly concerning personal and collective feelings of despair, hopelessness,alienation, loneliness, frustration and, as each member enters middle age, reflections on growing older.
What is different is the way in which they have gone about composing, and delivering, the songs on this record. For the large part, electric guitars are excluded in favour of a more intimate, acoustic affair which suitably avoids the twee elements of folk, and instead focuses on the spirited expressions of each member’s individual musical interests; not only Sean Moore‘s love of brass, but also Nicky Wire‘s dalliances into noise and electronica.
Surprisingly, James Dean Bradfield has taken a backseat with regards to a handful of the vocal duties. A decision that, at first glance, seems a little strange. After all, Bradfield’s torch bearing, often angry, emotive yelp has been the defining characteristic of the Manics’ sound throughout their career. On ‘Rewind The Film’, a number of tracks are garnished with other vocalists, including Richard Hawley, Kate Le Bon (who offers her lush vocals to the desolately beautiful ‘4 Lonely Roads‘) and young songwriter Lucy Rose.
On album opener ‘This Sullen Welsh Heart‘, Bradfield sings warmly over a bed of finely plucked acoustic guitars and distant organ drones while the siren-like backing of Lucy Rose hovers about the chorus, jointly carving out the cutting ruminations of a fatally flawed, lonesome character. Of course, as with the good majority of Manic Street Preacher lyrics, the meaning beyond the facade is more collective than singular, with the nature of the words here pointing not only to an individual point of view, but also multiple vistas of social and political pot shots.
Lead single ‘Show Me The Wonder‘ is a stark opposite to the opening track. Yes, it stays n the gentler side of rock, but is also lovingly layered with a fanfare of anthemic horns, recalling the euphoria of Embrace‘s 1997 hit ‘All You Good Good People‘.
The title track is truly beautiful, as Richard Hawley steps up for main vocal duties, offering a lamenting delivery that recalls the earthy fragility of Johnny Cash against a backing of souring glide guitar soaked with beautifully maudlin, swirling strings that drift like ghosts from some Fifties movie atop an almost ambient drip dropping bass line.
The stark ‘Builder Of Routines‘ is one of the album’s finest, and begins with a cute, though slightly frenetic, xylophone refrain which descends into a rolling jam of acoustic, drums and inflections of light orchestration over which Bradfield ponders middle age, and the anguish and irritation which comes at such a point in one’s life.
‘(I Miss) The Tokyo Skyline’ bubbles with eastern promise, where Oriental violins flourish and swoop incidentally across oddly chugging, excitable programmed electronics layered, here and there, with odd touches of driving electric guitar squalls which mesh together to instill a similar, though more subtle, rush of excitement to a tune that isn’t thematically too dissimilar to ‘Australia‘ from ‘Everything Must Go‘.
‘Manorbier‘ is a surprisingly succulent little instrumental soundscape (aside from a festival of wordless vocals towards its close) which straddles the line of post rock, with elements of surf guitar not dissimilar to the sonic landscapes of The Durutti Column and Mogwai, though with a euphoric sense of urgency that takes little under five minutes to pan out, rather than twenty five, after which the album ends on a bang with ‘30 Year War‘.
Energetic with a definitively political edge, the track was written about the tyranny of Margaret Thatcher, long before her demise, and has a lyrical raw power which is, to the impartial radio observer, hidden aboard an upbeat sounding array of more traditional folk sounding instrumentation, when its intentions could quite easily be seen propping up the bars of some skull crushing punk song.
This band know that, essentially, they have the luxury of nothing to prove, and with this release neither do they seem eager to recapture the nostalgia of their youth. After all, that was never going to be their style.
And while a few of their efforts over the last decade have lapsed into self parody, here, they have produced their best record for years.
