Lifeblood – Manic Street Preachers (2004)
The 20th anniversary reissue presents an album that has greatly improved with age
Over three and half decades the Manic Street Preachers have been music’s most interesting band. Yet what makes the band so compelling often has little to do with their actual music. Despite one extraordinary album (The Holy Bible), an excellent one (Everything Must Go), and a very good one (Journal For Plague Lovers), as well as a handful of other great songs, the bulk of their 14 albums isn’t remarkable.
Which doesn’t necessarily mean the band are unlistenable. Many of their songs are unintentionally funny, and that is enjoyable in itself. Others are intentionally funny – the cartoon element of the band has always strong – while some hold sentimental value that transcends their quality in comparison to music that may be considered cool.
Yet the band are far more than their musical output. Rather than a band, they are a culture. You don’t listen to the Manic Street Preachers, you live them. Everything that swirls around them is just as important as the sound they make. Once you’re inside their world, they are a dedication. Or an imprint. You can drift away for periods, but you never leave them. At least one eye is always on them.
This month the band released a 20th anniversary edition of their 2004 album Lifeblood. The album had been somewhat disowned by the band, given that it is the only album – bar their debut – to not have reached the Top Ten in the United Kingdom. Especially to chart obsessed bassist and lyricist, Nicky Wire, its sales performance was devastating. However, enough time has passed since its release for the band to reevaluate – and reclaim – it.
This reclamation is justified. It is an album that time has been very kind to. Far kinder than many of their other albums. Stylistically it was a shift for the band, an attempt to create a “cold” album, with a cleaner guitars and icy synths. It’s a sound that gives the album a timelessness, and could even been seen as prescient. Wire described the album as “elegiac pop”, an album that is calm, somber and understated.
Lifeblood’s tone fits into one of the overarching themes of the band. Wire has been trying to retire since at least the early-90s. Songs like Hibernation, This Is Yesterday and the ridiculous Mr Carbohydrate, have made it clear that sitting at home and doing nothing is his primary objective. But alongside these early songs, there have also been whole albums that whose core sentiment is an open resignation. Most obviously This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours (1998) and Rewind The Film (2013), and Lifeblood as well.
Yet Wire’s desire to retreat from the world has always been in tension with the band’s relentless work ethic. They may have sought to reach beyond their origins in a small Welsh mining town, but an honest day’s labour is an ingrained cultural habit. And, of course, Wire has always wanted the world to know how much he loves his own seclusion and domestiques – leading to turning his languor into words.
While Lifeblood may be part of this trilogy of seclusion, it’s not entirely an album of retreat like This Is My Truth… or nostalgia like Rewind The Film. Despite its subdued tone, the album instead sits within the the band’s canon of kicking against prevailing winds, in its own unique way.
The modus operandi of the band has always been reactionary – towards whatever was the dominant style or cultural movement of the time, and towards themselves. This has been essential to the band’s personality, but also part of their hubris.
From thinking they could destroy the blissed-out vibes Madchester with their original highly political tinny punk, to the hand-grenade hurled into the pastiche of Britpop that was The Holy Bible. In this vein, Lifeblood’s sound was a conscious rejection of rock revival and partyboy posturing of the early-2000s through bands like The Strokes and The Libertines. This was an album for definitely staying at home, and preferably in bed. Alone.
Despite the band’s initial ambition to be the greatest rock and roll band of all time, coupled with Wire’s own relish at creating controversy with his mouth and his enthusiasm for dressing the part, this has always been for show. Hedonism, or even a good time, has never been a band priority, and a strong suspicion of those who like having a good time has always been a defining feature.
But alongside being a rejection of early-2000s music culture, Lifeblood’s sound and focus was also a reaction to the band’s previous album, Know Your Enemy – and its incoherent mess of different styles and bad ideas. For the 20th anniversary edition of that album, the band claimed that Know Your Enemy was actually meant to be a double album, but was whittled down to a single album of seemingly randomly selected songs. However, the revised double album re-issue wasn’t much better, with its new format making it seem even more like a cocaine album (but without the cocaine).
Know Your Enemy’s original tracklist began with Found That Soul – a song that was meant to be a rejection of the insipid nature of This Is My Truth…. Wire kicking off the bed sheets and heading to the garage to make some molotov cocktails. But the song didn’t really cut it. The sentiment was somewhat diminished by releasing it as a single simultaneously with So Why So Sad – a song of Wire contemplating the tension between his personal duality of enfant terrible and lethargic homebody.
That said, despite perplexing people with its musical style (and being unfairly dismissed because of it), So Why So Sad is one of the great Manic Street Preachers songs, and the best Beach Boys song since the late-1960s. It is also one of Wire’s finest lyrics – not overreaching and paying close attention to each word. It’s a song that wasn’t just trying something new for the sake of it (as much of Know Your Enemy was), but of the band being focused on the craft of creating a gem. In spirit, if not in sound, it had similar sense of confidence and purpose to Everything Must Go.
But it was purpose and especially focus that the band lost with Know Your Enemy in total, and this is what Lifeblood sought to rectify. To create a much tighter album built around a consistent sound and tone. To be an album, not just a collection of songs. Although, of course, Wire couldn’t resist at least some kind of friction.
If Know Your Enemy was confounding to many, then Lifeblood’s first single being an electro-pop song called The Love Of Richard Nixon wasn’t going to help. Fifteen years since their first release the idea of – somehow – gaining great popularity by antagonising everyone was still an approach the band considered viable.
Yet the song was far more than just its shock value. The band can been seen as having a certain affinity with the former U.S President. Like them, he was born into far from privileged circumstances, and through sheer force of personality manifested their respective places in history. Despite becoming president, and despite the band having achieved a great amount of success, both would see themselves as having a vision and ambition unrealised. “The times they fall behind you” could be line applicable to the band themselves as well as Nixon – in particular during The Holy Bible period (and maybe Lifeblood itself in its own way).
It is this ambition and vision that leads off the album. Ever self-mythologising, 1985 is a song about the first song that Wire and singer/guitarist James Dean Bradfield wrote as 16 year olds. It’s a monster of a song, inexplicably not chosen as a single. Although colder in sound, in tone it is similar to what Bradfield called the “wistful resistance” of Everything Must Go. The band’s supreme knack for making melancholy sound euphoric.
Yet following 1985 and the bouncy The Love Of Richard Nixon the album descends into an elongated sigh. Chief among these sighs is the exquisite I Live To Fall Asleep. As someone who spent several years with avoiding life, with no drive and desperate to be asleep (with the help of whatever I could get my hands on) it is also a deeply personal and quite devastating song to me.1 It probably one of the most subtle and restrained songs the band has recorded, and alongside Solitude Sometimes Is, the album’s thematic centre.
I Live To Fall Asleep is also a song where Wire has greater focus with his lyrics. Wire is an occasionally brilliant, but often lazy, lyricist. With (missing, presumed dead) former band member Richey Edwards no longer around to obsessively hone their lyrics, Wire’s lyrics often seem like first drafts. Word choice could be improved, analogies and similes are often weak, and plenty of lines lack substance or purpose. A song like Empty Souls could have been something special with some of its clunkier lines refined.
It is here where he lets the band down on Lifeblood. Bradfield’s gorgeous guitar lines on To Repel Ghosts and Glasnost deserve matching lyrics. As the band’s workhorse – or “industrious mountain goat” as he once described himself – Bradfield’s ability to craft music aligned to Wire’s (and Edwards’s previously) sentiments is often remarkable (see The Holy Bible). The band’s unique division of labour means he (alongside his cousin, drummer, Sean Moore) has the task of inhabiting a mindset not his own to create music that best expresses these ideas. Although he and Wire have been friends since 5 year old and are able to clearly communicate their visions to each other, its an under-appreciated skill.
Bradfield versatility as a guitarist is also one of the band’s overlooked assets. The band’s reactionary instincts means that they is often dramatically changing musical styles between albums, as they reject both their previous sound and whatever is stylish at the time. And Bradfield has been easily able to musically accommodate whoever Wire is hating next.
On Lifeblood this versatility is apparent on the curious Always/Never, whose subtle funk stands out amongst the sighs of the album’s latter half. It’s a song, alongside its sister, the b-side Everyone Knows/Nobody Cares (joining the legion of truly great Manics b-sides) that serve as a precursor to the new wave and even krautrock influence exhibited on 2014’s Futurology album – the band’s most musically experimental album, albeit another where Wire’s (honestly, cringe) lyrics let down Bradfield and Moore’s music.
Despite its poor reception at the time, the 20th anniversary reissue of Lifeblood reveals the band at one of their creative peaks. Although far from the heights of The Holy Bible or Everything Must Go, it is one of their more consistent releases, only let down by its two closing tracks (Fragments and Cardiff Afterlife). It is an album where they got their reaction to the era’s dominant culture right. Rather than being trapped in time (like Generation Terrorists) it’s an album that has been able to transcend it.
It’s worth checking out the original demo recorded by Bradfield on a cassette included in the deluxe reissue. He hasn’t got the melody of the chorus quite right, but the intimacy of the recording suits the song really well. And is quite amusing that he does a guitar solo with his voice.