Manic Street Preachers - The Second Great Depression

Something wonderful has happened. I got seduced.

Me and the Manics have always been an on-off kind of affair. First, the coltish, hard-rock strut of 'Generation Terrorists', which features both their best and worst songs - 'Motorcycle Emptiness' and 'Nat-West Barclays Midlands Lloyds' ("Black Horse apocalypse!" Ha).

Then, 'Gold Against The Soul', with its gloriously unfashionable eulogy to an old warhorse ('La Tristesse Durera') wedged up alongside the petulant sneer of 'Roses In The Hospital' ("We don't want your fucking love!"). Fine by me...

Then, Richey was gone and we all bowed heads and paid respect to that most raking swirl of fear and self-loathing, 'The Holy Bible' - a tortured young man's crazed sign-off to a world he simply didn't want to be a part of any more.

'This Is My Truth, Tell Me Yours'? Nicky Wire's leftist sloganeering sitting stodgily with James Dean Bradfield's vocal power-cords.

'Know Your Enemy'? I can't remember a single track. Actually, 'So Why So Sad' is okay...

'Lifeblood'? Anaemic. It sounded like the end. Like they were all out of ire and ideas. Cued up for sad-eyed solo careers and session spots.

On first couple of listens, new album 'Send Away The Tigers' trickled over me like one of those prickly, weedy showers you get in crappy guest houses. Did the job, but not much fun. It gave me the distinct impression I was listening to music, but pretty much left me just as it found me.

But after the third and fourth goes (I love 'em enough to owe that) the sales rep-friendly simplicity began to feel more like no-bullshit charm. The sound of three men getting a bit older with both dash and dignity. Like they've realised how clinging to arch, hormonal swagger as they approach their forties is all very Peter Stringfellow and it's time to lose the politico pomp and get busy telling you their truth - they've lived a little, they're older, wiser, smarter and - yes - a fuck of a lot cooler than they were six years ago ranting on about Cuba.

Not that the spirit is weak or the darkness diluted. There's a song on 'Send Away The Tigers' called 'Your Love Alone Is Not Enough'. It's a nice tune. Probably on the radio right now. It features that lovely woman from The Cardigans. And it's about suicide. Or, more specifically, about the horror and regret of having someone close to you commit suicide ("I could've shown you how to smile/I could've shown you how to cry"). Nicky Wire doesn't write too many songs directly about his old friend Richey, but this is where he makes his often-mumbled feelings achingly clear - including a twinge of irritation at being perceived as the band's second-best well-read angry man ("I could have written all your lines...")

So, I got seduced. Like out of a dodgy rom-com. First, I hated it. Now I can't get enough of it. Particularly 'The Second Great Depression', which, although it's clearly something to do with Iraq and all that, I'm personally reclaiming as a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful song about the mental alchemy of transforming pain and sorrow into fond/bittersweet memory (also see 'Enola/Alone').

I'm not saying 'Send Away The Tigers' is a great album (the squally 'Rendition' and closer 'Winterlovers' are clunkers). But its resemblance to 'Everything Must Go' is telling. That album was a bullish new beginning, but still cast in the shadow of their former life. After ten troubled years, the Richey weight has finally lifted. 'Send Away The Tigers' is the sound of a band finally emerging from the murk of mourning and into a new dawn with a clear, confident voice.

[MP3] Manic Street Preachers - The Second Great Depression

Ulrich Schnauss - Medusa

I've just come back from a nice holiday on the Isle Of Wight, which is one of my favourite places in the world. Ulrich Schnauss's new album 'Goodbye' is out soon and, a few weeks ago, I hated it. Now I love it like a wayward child.

The Isle Of Wight is hardly, say, Wyoming, but a brief switch from the teeming, toppling oppression of London to a relaxed, manageable, mostly seafaring and rural little rock was exactly the shift I needed to appreciate the album's widescreen, none-more-epicness. Probably something to do with the cheery, rolling, green, pleasant hills contrasting with the far-away grey and gloomy jostle of the surly Solent. (It rained a lot).

Ulrich Schnauss is a man who probably finds concepts like 'melody' a bit quaint. He works in broad, swooping brush-strokes; splattering his canvas with interlocking, often overwhelming textures. He conjures panoramic, windswept, abstract landscapes; dream-woven with gale-force sighs, glittering despair, lurching euphoria... Every individual note yawns and howls and reverberates like it's glancing off the wall of a bottomless pit.

He used to listen to a lot of My Bloody Valentine, see. And, with 'Goodbye', he's clearly tried to make his own private 'Loveless'.

And, in his own doleful little way, he's succeeded.

You have to admire any musician for whom 'making music' simply isn't enough. Like Kevin Shields, 16-odd years ago, Schnauss is aiming higher - for alchemy. Turning rough to smooth, discord to harmony, lament to eulogy...

'Medusa' is like charging, head-down, through a clattering rainstorm, being dive-bombed by thunderclaps, to emerge at the end in a spotlight of hopeful sunbeams. (Check that closing swell of heavenly choir).

And God bless him for contrasting all the melodrama with that kinky little four-note popcorn-pop. (Crank the volume in the last five seconds and you can hear the kernels zapping in the microwave).

[MP3] Ulrich Schnauss - Medusa