From The Archives – Originally Published June 6th, 2009
So we all smiled, shed a few tears and hugged each other’s metaphors as we raised our pints to Richey Edwards and the Manic Street Preachers’ decision to resurrect his surviving field notes as the basis for Journal for Plague Lovers. Had it been any other band, we’d probably have dismissed the exercise as empty symbolism, propaganda dressed up as sentimentality. But this was the Manics, an institution whose moral authority remains practically untouchable in certain circles. Fans duly embraced the gesture, celebrating the refusal to release singles and even railing against supermarkets over the album’s challenging artwork. Somewhere along the way, Edwards became an almost mythical, ego-less songwriter, his memory swallowed up by the band’s elephantine mythology and our own appetite for a little collective grief.
Except the memorial rather misses the point. Edwards was a product of his time, acutely aware of its cultural obsessions, its absurdities and his own physical fragility. No amount of posthumous excavation could recreate The Holy Bible, a record that remains one of the defining musical statements of its era: a filthy, beautiful collision of art, politics and personal anguish. Few bands make music with that sort of visceral, confrontational force any more, perhaps because fewer people are prepared to listen. But on Travels With Myself and Another, Future of the Left do. They still drag art, politics and life through the gutter, wipe the resulting mess across your face and shove it straight into your brain. And thank your low-life, baby-eating, slime-infested god for that.
Not many bands would centre their album around the practicalities of worshipping the devil. Ozzy didn’t talk about getting all those goat hairs out from beneath his foreskin. Cue “You Need Satan More Than He Needs You”, where the hitherto entirely separate worlds of bestiality and two for one cinema tickets collide, with FOTL singer Andy Falkous querulously screeching “What kind of orgy leaves a sense of deeper love?”, whilst waiting for the babysitter’s lift to arrive.
Spotting these juxtapositions – and bugging you with them because they can – seems to be the band’s stock in trade. Its the kind of tear it apart to see how it works philosophy so beloved of Steve Albini, producer of Falkous and drummer Jack Egglestone’s previous outfit McClusky, except instead of using the trad guidelines of the moral and ethical principles that mollify our daily lives. Like The Holy Bible though, all this works because the music makes the words mean something, needing each other like dragons and tin foil, revelling in a self-destructive symbiosis where men hit women and the women kill and then eat them. Opener Arming Eritrea grinds like T-Rex being pulled apart by Albini’s Big Black, impossibly/epically intense, never quite letting you get away from the omnipresent feeling of being mocked by a superior being. Here and there too the sublime lives in the same space as the ridiculous; at the beginning of Throwing Bricks At Trains, Falkous candidly reveals a “Slight bowel movement preceded the bloodless coup”, whilst on closer Lapsed Catholics he muses ruminatively on whose (Hollywood) prison break was the most impressive.
Interviewed recently, Falkous claimed that he and bandmates existed beneath the bread line, despite being rolled up in positive criticism for FOTL’s 2007 debut Curses and previously for the dissolved McClusky. Such is the general public’s refusal to acknowledge them or what they stand for, a gig in Cambridge in 2008 drew just forty-four people. Its bred the sociopathic antipathy that fuels the likes here of the blistering Drink Nike, the kind of thing Therapy? used to scratch into our foreheads before their line up became like an exercise in muso speed dating.
Stay contorted then, because Stand By Your Mannatee is both side-splittingly hilarious and face-splittingly crazy, a scabrous pun (yoo-man-atee, geddit) whilst being probably the most vital hundred and twenty-nine seconds of your life in the year of our lord 2009. Aw look, come on, if James Dean Bradfield had written it you’d have lapped it up, lolling in ersatz nostalgia for a stranger, so why not try listening to Yin/Post Yin? You very well might not get Travels With Myself and Another, but for once do what your told and just buy it like all the others, like your clothes, your car, your stink, your hair, your plimsolls and your tolerant fuck buddy. You spend all your life living in a cage of your own manufacture, so grasp this one last chance to change your life. Trust me – Richie would’ve loved it.
