Postcards From a Young Man

Manic Street Preachers back to life

The long and eventful life of the Wales-based Manic Street Preachers stores a great collection of difficult moments, yet the most trying one was the mysterious departure of the band’s ideological leader Richie Edwards. That was a blow that to many seemed a knockout strike for the ensemble. If drawing further parallels with boxing, Manic Street Preachers looked like a boxer who stood up again and started waving his arms chaotically and weakly. Weak, indeed, were the band’s attempts to bring back the gone fame. After a streak of average records released at the beginning of the new century, the musicians were crushed by… extremely strict critics and too impatient listeners who united as one to finish Manic Street Preachers. They did not believe in the new form of the band with softer music and tolerant lyrics and preferred to see the death of the ensemble. Yet Manic Street Preachers were a too good band with a too glorious past to have an end like this. The rockers proved their right to carry on as they released a very solid record called Journal For Plagued Lovers backed by the lyrics of Edwards. Both the quality and the quantity of the material made even the most hardcore skeptics to speak about the dawn of the new stage in the Manic Street Preachers history. Inspired by this rising, the band took only a year to present another studio album, Postcards From A Young Man.

True punk-rock is found only in the closing part of the album

Track number one, (It’s Not War) Just The End Of Love, became a single, which has all the reasons for this thank to Bradfield’s characteristic vocals to be loved by total majority and, at the same time, a perfect tuneful chorus that prevents you from thinking over what the song is about. The following pieces, Postcards From A Young Man, and Some Kind Of Nothingness, stick to the same pattern as they unfold nice melodies and soft strings in the background. Generally speaking, if you replace the drive-ridden Auto-Intoxication with the ballad Golden Platitudes, the whole first part of the new Manic Street Preachers album would consist of pretty commercial stuff. It might remind someone of the least radical works by the band back from the late nineties. Those who look for a harder material and more punk-rock oriented songs should go straight to number eight, I Think I Found It. Don’t Be Evil, and A Billion Balconies Facing The Sun, in fact, look like something that was not designed for this set and sneaked here occasionally. There is a sensation that the rockers held it inside them as long as they could and then finally lost control and let it out at the end of the work.

Commercialization on their way?

Nicky Wire was the one who penned the lyrics for the new album by Manic Street Preachers. This member of the band said in one of the interviews that the ensemble got tired of having a social and propagandistic fight all alone. Manic Street Preachers were beginning as messengers of middle class where people had accumulated many questions to those who influence their lives. For the twenty five of the band’s activity, many would try to imitate their sounding and style, but only a few dared to speak on the bitter topics. That is why Postcards From A Young Man is a pop-oriented record with soft songs without the bitterness that we felt in the lyrics of the early Manic Street Preachers. Although there is only a year that separates the releases of Journal For Plagued Lovers and Postcards From A Young Man, and both albums are associated with the band’s resurrection period, these records have many more differences than things they have in common. The milder variant of the popular ensemble’s music does not mean that their music has become worse, but it may disappoint those who love the Preachers when they reveal their rebellious nature and punk-rock aggressiveness.