Manic Street Preachers
Know Your Enemy

THE REVIEW

The roughest album by the Manics, their sixth, the second entirely composed without the support of Richie James, has always been the most criticized, neglected, and poorly received. Because, in order: it's too raw, it proposes a deliberately punk style that doesn't suit the band, it's too flamboyant, it's too long (!!). Indeed, the album is dirty, moderately hard, quite varied, and certainly very long (sixteen tracks, plus a hidden track). Which, frankly, I've always liked very much.

Much of the credit for this roughness goes to Dave Eringa's heavily invasive production, although, no doubt, the Manics put in their own effort, through a more aggressive use of guitars and more eclectic and skewed writing, and thus more manipulable. There's a bit of everything in the album, without the result being overly heterogeneous: it goes from the punk-rock start of "Found That Soul" (remarkable) to the disco-funky of "Miss Europa Disco Dancer", from the rock-folk of "The Year Of Purification" to the country-blues of "Wattsville blues", up to true bursts of brit-rock like "Dead Martyrs", which also flaunts a distinctly Joy-Division-esque attack, or the concluding "Freedom Of Speech Won't Feed My Children". The best moments are found in "So Why So Sad", which to the beach-boysian choruses of the verse adds a refrain where Bradfield's nostalgic singing emerges, in "Ocean Spray", a mid-tempo piece that brings the salty breath of the sea and has its peak in a majestic trumpet solo, and in the bitterness of "His Last Painting", supported by a simple but effective acoustic arpeggio.

Actually, the album has no obvious drop in tension, just some slight dips in more vaguely bland sections ("Baby Elian"). Wire always offers high quality in songwriting: the evocation of the Cuban meeting with Castro (in the appreciable "Let Robeson Sing") and the virtuosic citationism of "The Convalescent", a true informal collage that brings together the Manics' passion for art and their postmodern layering of everyday weariness ("Kleenex kitchen towels and teletext tv: my favourite inventions of the twentieth century"). The concluding part is also enjoyable, where the Manics usually tend to lose pace (see the last album): "Royal Corrispondent" pits an ultra-distorted bass against Bradfield's acoustic melancholy, "Epicentre" begins with a brilliantly simple arpeggio, then enriches itself with a keyboard accompaniment that softens the usual Manics style, here almost tropical, and increasingly pop. Also worth mentioning is the hidden "We Are All Bourgeois Now", a cover of McCarthy.

Definitely a less subdued album than the previous "This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours," it is not, as always said, a failed attempt to regain the blurred and defiant glories of "The Holy Bible." Rather, it is an approach to the more distinctly pop maturity of today's Manics through a more winding and wavering path, but always at good levels: the inspiration is certainly not lacking, and the ambition to fancifully disguise it with showy and perhaps even somewhat over-the-top arrangements should be appreciated, also because, on closer inspection, almost always hits the mark.