MANIC STREET PREACHERS - EVERYTHING MUST GO - 9/10
There's understandably a lot of significance attached to Everything Must Go as it stands in the Manics' discography. The first album released after the mysterious disappearance of lyricist Richie Edwards, with his lyrics still comprising about half the album, it's inevitable that his album would turn out to be a crossroads for the band - at once a swan song for the edgier, more brash Manic Street Preachers who reached their apex with The Holy Bible and a harbinger of the softer and more personable form the band would take beginning with This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours. Albums released after the death of a band member always take a form larger than themselves, and take on an additional weight and significance. Listening to The Lost Riots by Hope of the States, for instance, becomes all the more emotionally impactful with the knowledge that the band's guitarist had committed suicide months before the album's release. This makes the album difficult to rate as well - I have no qualms in giving extra points to an album for the unfortunate milestone that it represents for the artists responsible for it, but there's also the question of if the album sounds different to someone unaware of the context in which it was written and recorded. Nonetheless, Everything Must Go is a terrific album that would easily stand up even without this knowledge, and while some of the less immediately grasping songs like "Small Black Flowers That Grow in the Sky" and the title track are greatly illuminated by this context, this album has plenty of tracks that are tremendously expressive and eminently listenable. The obvious stand-out is "A Design For Life", the very title of which hints at the ambition that it takes on, and the delivery James Dean Bradfield gives in the chorus is unavoidably chilling in its sincerity. Other tracks, like "Enola/Alone", "Interiors (Song for Willem de Kooning)" (I should note here that Manic Street Preachers are the only human beings that I am aware of who seem to actually appreciate Willem de Kooning. Even I find his work to be rather unpleasant, and only this song gives it any sort of value for me by revealing his portraits to be depictions of the distorted and wretched beings inside all of us), the sensitively confessional "Further Away", and the simple but soaring closer "No Surface All Feeling" are empowered by Bradfield's potent voice, with to me resembles a more masculine version of JJ72 singer Mark Greaney's in its range and angsty edge (I should note that I'm well aware that Greaney likely borrowed some mannerisms from Bradfield, as JJ72 came to prominence almost a decade after the Manics did). The album, for all of the pain out of which it must have been created, is remarkable in its forward-thinking attitude, as in the lines "There are times when you feel hopeless / Just for once, for no-one else, we are blameless / The dawn is still breaking, it's heaven is so high" from "The Girl Who Wanted to Be God". And yet, for all this, the album remains a classic Manic Street Preachers album with its political commentary, with lines like "Libraries gave us power / Then work came and made us free" from "A Design For Life". All in all, this album is probably the best overall if you someone like me who hasn't quite gotten acquainted with the edgy Manic Street Preachers of The Holy Bible, as it seems to me to be clearly more consistent than the band's later releases. Highlights include "A Design For Life", "Enola/Alone", "Further Away".
POLVO - EXPLODED DRAWING - 7.5/10
The arbitrariness of doing this in alphabetical order means that I'm reviewing this album before Today's Active Lifestyles, which seems dreadfully inappropriate, but I've already written myself into this corner so I'll have to deal with it. Polvo is a difficult band to describe to someone who hasn't listened to them. They're kind of post-rock, since they change time signatures all the time, but they've also got a Lo-Fi punk thing going on. I guess the best way to explain it is a Archers of Loaf if they only listened to Slint and Rodan for a year. Not only the time changes, but also the obscure, at times nonsensical lyrics suggest this comparison. These two elements are shared between Polvo's second album and generally accepted magnum opus, Today's Active Lifestyles, and the follow-up to that album, Exploded Drawing. The titles of both albums serve as a great summation of each album - where Today's Active Lifestyles was constantly moving and kinetic, yet still strangely controlled, Exploded Drawing seems to find a much looser Polvo, as well as an much angstier one. This looseness serves as a both a strength and a weakness. At its strong points, this album seems like a brilliant, stream-of-consciousness work of art, blending lyrical absurdities with a tremendous range of experimentation on guitar. "Passive Attack" is for me the shining light of this approach - an atmospheric pastiche that seems to sound more like traditional Asian music than American indie rock. When this album manages to keep things sounding fresh, it's extremely engaging, as in album opener "Fast Canoe", "Street Knowledge", and "Taste of Your Mind." Polvo's originality with simply instrumental sections shines as well in "Passive Attack", "Street Knowledge", and "The Secret's Secret". Like many bands leaning toward post rock, sections of brilliance rarely last especially long, but neither to the less interesting moments. Tellingly, one of the most enjoyable songs on this album is the noticeably uninventive "In This Life," which maintains a standard song structure with a clearly distinct verse and chorus but a still interesting and unique guitar arrangement. "Taste of Your Mind" similarly courts convention with solid results. Conversely, some moments go too far into the deep end, such as the almost pointlessly odd "The Purple Bear", with lines like "When I give the signal, start eating dirt, sing into a shovel, and take off your shirt". Finally, the sheer length of this album, at nearly an hour with a 10 minute closing song, leaves too much opportunity for lost interest. Nonetheless, this album has many moments where Polvo's originality and wit shine through, with a much more jagged, and perhaps sincere, edge than on the irreverently anarchic and apathetic Today's Active Lifestyles. Highlights include "Passive Attack", "Street Knowledge", "In This Life".
FAILURE - FANTASTIC PLANET - 9/10
I'm very torn on this one over a very minor distinction. I think this deserves a 9 like Everything Must Go up above - on the one hand, it's completely brilliant as a whole, and brilliantly manages to establish it's spacey atmosphere seemingly out of nothing. That nothing is the reason I somehow feel like I should keep it at 8.5, which is that the songs themselves, except for the truly transcendent ones on this album, generally hover around the very good level rather than the brilliant level. And yet, there's something compelling about this album that really sets it apart. On this surface, this sounds an awful lot like Nirvana, which means it also sounds an awful lot like quite a few mediocre to terrible American bands of the 1990's, but at the same time, there's something gripping about the songs on this album that I find it hard to place. Maybe it's that creepy clicking motif that reappears throughout? Maybe it's the fact that there's a sincerity in the songs on Fantastic Planet that other American post-grunge bands fail to communicate? Take "Sergeant Politeness", for example. It sounds like a typical grunge song, yet for some reason when that chorus kicks in, with the pulsing, heavy guitar riff, it's impossible to not get swept up in it. This song doesn't follow Nirvana's quiet-loud formula: it goes from loud to louder, as many of the songs on this album do, including opening track "Saturday Saviour", "Pillowhead", and the especially impressive "Smoking Umbrellas." This is absolutely an album that you need to listen to all the way through. While some of the songs are outstanding enough to hold up well on their own, the whole thing is just accentuated by playing it in sequence, and not only because it's meant to chart a journey through drug abuse, but because the thrilling force of songs like "Sergeant Politeness" and "Smoking Umbrellas" make the softer moments, such as "Blank" and the jaw-droppingly flawless "The Nurse Who Loved Me" not simply brilliant, but transcendent. The course from "Segue 3" to "The Nurse Who Loved Me" to "Another Space Song" to the finish is nearly flawless, and starts to defuse the brute force that drives the first few songs of the album. There's also something about the sound of this album that's dark and empty, like outer space; something strangely over-rational and unfeeling, like the giant aliens from the movie this album was named after. And while on their own songs like "Pitiful", "Leo", and "Stuck On You" seem unremarkable, this album is truly riveting as a whole, with the best songs transformed by their surroundings into blissful moments of clarity. Highlights include "Smoking Umbrellas," "Pillowhead", "The Nurse Who Loved Me."
