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

Something For The Weekend: The Killers - All These Things That I've Done

Let's get this nice and clear. Brandon Flowers, if he lives to be 106, will not write a better song than this.

Actually, he's written one other song that runs it close - 'Why Do I Keep Counting?'.

You're probably snorting. Thinking, 'What about 'Somebody Told Me'? And 'Mr Brightside'?

What 'All These Things That I've Done' and 'Why Do I Keep Counting?' have in common is that they're both the sounds of an all-too-human self-doubter howling out for a sign, some kind of spiritual redemption. I mean, apart from the sex and love stuff, shouldn't all songs be about that? (Also see - Gnarls Barkley - Crazy).

What makes 'All These Things I've Done' so delicious is that Brandon Flowers is, apparently, a man who believes in God. I half-envy people who believe in God, because they have a nice, neat moral framework to define the edges - a clear line of defence against all the chaos.

Then again, it must be pretty frustrating when, with all your fleshy, needful human cravings, you can't help but spill over the boundaries.

So, the narrator of 'All These Things I've Done' is a man who considers himself 'good' admitting he's done 'bad' and vowing to change track - to use the experience of the bad to recalibrate the good.

Musically, it's a glorious great stomping juggernaut. A one-man march of defiance against his greatest failings. A gutsy proclamation of how it hasn't killed him so he's decided to make himself stronger.

But The Killers - bless 'em - are hardly the most charismatic band in the history of rock. Just look at them. They pull all the right moves but silly haircuts and ill-advised facial hair can't hide basic awkwardness. Still, as the mighty JG Ballard once wrote, "Be ordinary in your life, extraordinary in your art".

'All These Things I've Done' is the sound of an ordinary man (got soul, not a soldier) creating something very extraordinary indeed.

The Killers - All These Things That I've Done

LCD Soundsystem - All My Friends

"I wouldn't trade one stupid decision for another five years of life..."

Sorry to go all literary on your ass, but there's this poem, right... There's this poem by TS Eliot, called The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock. And you should read it. Go on. It's here... Read it!

Good, eh? A withering, unflinching, lyrical evocation of the slow-motion panic of ageing. The queasy feeling that the best is done and the worst is yet to come. All gnawed up and toxic with time-terror.

By contrast, this is the best song ever about how looking back can be a big part of moving forward. About not being a Prufrock. About being thankful to have something to reflect on - not regret.

And, Jesus, one of the tracks of the year, too. The way it's so cheekily based around that circling, jittery, mantra-like loop of bittersweet bullishness which, in the last minute or so, comes crashing out into a euphoric, one-hit chorus of celebratory nostalgia ("If I could see all my friends tonight!")

I've just listened to it again and spent the 7-something minutes thinking, one by one, about all the people I've known who I liked or loved and, although I might never see or connect with most of them again, how they've all played some part into shaping who I am today.

Good therapy.

[MP3] LCD Soundsystem - All My Friends

Queens Of The Stone Age - Sick, Sick, Sick

A song about dirty, greasy, stabby, grabby, needy, greedy, whorish, moreish, shouting, pouting, slappy, happy, wrong, wrong, wrong, bad, bad, bad sex.

The best kind, then.

[MP3] Queens Of The Stone Age - Sick, Sick, Sick

Something For The Weekend: Furniture - Brilliant Mind

Furniture are yer classic '80s one-hit wonders - a ragtag of Londoners and Eastern-Europeans who, astonishingly, released four albums. But 'Brilliant Mind' is their sky-highlight. A precious, pristine, perfectly distilled four minutes of fame.

'Brilliant Mind' made the UK Top 20 in the days when the UK Top 20 really mattered, but it's surrounded by a wonderful swirl of obscurity. A pop hit not popular enough for anyone to actually remember.

It's a song so good it became the death of them; a black hole insatiably sucking back everything else the band put out to prove how they weren't just about one song.

But they were, and what a song: jaunty, off-kilter intro... chilly, pre-packaged drum-fills... standard-issue miserabilism... And then that thrilling, mid-point starburst of sax-propelled sorrow and self-pity.

In the second half of the '80s, easily digestable synth-pop was bedded in and the silly haircuts and costumes made it all the more non-threatening. But Furniture's story isn't kitsch or pastel-shaded; it's a tragedy. Shat on and shafted by record-company greed and incompetence, they were under-supported, had their album pulled and deleted, were dropped, cast out into a lengthy court-case... And when they re-emerged in 1989, the world had moved on and their moment had gone.

With hindsight, 'Brilliant Mind' is more than just a dark and doomy wallow; a lament to love and obsession gone awry. It's the signature song for the band's descent from Top Of The Pops to rock-bottom ("Everybody's yelling about you and yours and how I'd have the answer if I'd only open up and just let you in/They must be out of their brilliant minds...")

And, excuse the clever-cleverness, but have a back-to-back listen to Furniture and this National track. Those Tindersticks/Nick Cave comparisons seem a bit off now, eh?

[MP3] Furniture - Brilliant Mind
[MP3] The National - Daughters Of The Soho Riots

Editors - Smokers Outside The Hospital Doors

I'm not going to play the 'Who's best - Editors or Interpol?' game, because it's stupid and makes people say things like, 'Editors are the poor man's Interpol' when, of course, they're the poor man's Bunnymen and anyway, Interpol are the poor man's, middle-class, more-exotic-because-they're-American Joy Division and...

Fuck it. Go on, then...

I've spend a week with the first two Interpol albums on repeat and I can confidently say that they're the most overrated band in the world right now. Y'know, I think they're really, really good, but Christ, the way people go all dizzy-eyed and devotional at their very mention...

Editors go for clarity. They have a keener ear for melody, while Interpol can be a bit meandering and murky (see 'The Heinrich Maneuver', a single that sounds like a throwaway album track). And although Interpol have some towering tunes (NYC, Untitled, Slow Hands...) they haven't quite mastered the art of telling a story, of crafting an album as a progression, a journey.

Editors first album definitely did that, and judging by this swelling, panoramic bewilderedbeast, their second is going to be another grand symphony of melancholy ("I can't shake this feeling I've got/My dirty hands, have I been in the wars?/The saddest thing I've ever seen/Is smokers outside the hospital doors...").

[MP3] Editors - Smokers Outside The Hospital Doors
[MP3] Interpol - The Heinrich Maneuver