Manic Street Preachers
Journal For Plague Lovers

THE REVIEW

How many of you have recalled the nonsense, the pains, the passions, the fanaticisms of when you were teenagers, young, innocently certain of life? Many, I believe. In life, we also face losses, fortunately rare in youth, but as intense as plasmatic ghosts, unexpectedly cruel like a double-edged wound. Always present. Threatening.

In the Brit Pop scene of '95 (damn... it's been almost 15 years!), there was a band that expressed the reality of those times with anger and energy, narrating popular adventures, myths, and legends with pub wisdom: they were the Manic Street Preachers.

The Manics have never been a pleasing band, that's known. They were not liked by the indie intelligentsia due to an excessive pseudo-glam brutality. They were not liked by the New Wave purists, given the excessive purity of the vocal lines. They were not liked by rockers, accused of excessive love for pop sounds. All this in Italy, of course. In the UK, they are considered a national treasure, not by chance.

In February 1995, a tragic event shook what was, in the end, a band like many others in the British scene: one of the members disappeared. It wasn’t a canonical disappearance in rock. It wasn’t death. It was disappearance in the purest sense of the term. It vanished into nothingness.

Richey Edwards, this is his name, exits a London hotel and never returns.

Losing someone so close can lead to terrible human consequences, a pain devoid of resignation, of illusory sublimation, of a symbol to testify the end. Only a treacherous hope remains, it slinks into all the occasions when you try to forget. Cruel like true suffering.

The remaining three members in the whirlwind will face everything that follows with exemplary dignity: never an interview to increase sales, never a rhetorical dedication song, never a farce with fans. Only silences and courteous bitter smiles. Nothing like Vespa. As usual, there are those who have maligned, but oh well.

Richey was declared legally dead in 2008. Thirteen years later. In these years, the three Manics alternated remarkable albums with real clueless works, quarreled against contemporary squalor, narrated their Wales, provoked a lot, and indulged in some whims. For instance, talking to Fidel Castro, just for fun. One thing, however, remained forbidden: talking about Richey.

"Journal for Plague Lovers" breaks that taboo, it is a collection of notes written by Richey before leaving his identity, readapted in lyrical form, set to music, and turned into a genuine album.

It's a music work much deeper than the ordinary: it's a commemoration, a processing of this damned beast called despair, it's an intense and never rhetorical tribute.

Well executed, as in every respectfully regarded memory mausoleum, sober and always appropriate. Tenderly beautiful and moving.

"Journal for Plague Lovers" terribly resembles "The Holy Bible", the last album made entirely with Richey Edwards, the one from 1995, to clarify.

It's a resemblance similar to those sweetly kitschy photographic overlays, like when you look at photos from the past reworking them with the sensitivity and eyes of the present.

The constant impression is that this album is truly the last, not in the commercial sense of the term, but in its pure sense. The Manics have settled the accounts, there is nothing more to say, to express, to contest. The last act is concluded, the most important one.

Because the Manic Street Preachers are like that: they have never flaunted artistic devices to testify their vision. It was enough to live and narrate. But when the pages are finished, it’s better to say: “it’s all over”. It’s all finished. A goodbye, albeit forced by resignation, to a friend.