Manic Street Preachers: Journal for Plague Lovers

U.K. outfit Manic Street Preachers’ ninth album, Journal for Plague Lovers, retains their 1990s guitar rock sound all the way.

A quick glance at the track list may produce a few chuckles: “Me and Stephen Hawking,” “Jackie Collins Existential Question Time,” “Virginia State Epileptic Colony” and the title track are absurd in their specificity. The band uses audio clips from cinema and other outside sources to enhance the artiness that these titles imply, a move that can be contrived at times and effective at others. 

“Jackie Collins Existential Question Time” opens with a guitar riff that could have been taken from the theme song of Friends or any similarly upbeat ’90s TV show. Guitarist James Dean Bradfield’s vocals take on a strange Broadway-esque glam glaze that undermines the band’s otherwise gritty sound, which is better served when bassist Nicky Wire handles the singing. 

“Me and Stephen Hawking” might show the vocals at their best, strained over busy, natural drums and distorted guitar. In the chorus, which has the only intelligible lyrics in the song, deceased band member Richey Edwards’ lyrics—taken from journals he left the band before his 1995 disappearance—lament how he and Stephen Hawking missed a “sex revolution,” a further example of the record’s bizarre imagery.

This isn’t to say that Journal doesn’t have its moments, which occur mostly in choruses like on “Pretension/Repulsion,” when the band unifies for a strong, full sound.

The Preachers do score points in my book for quoting the stunning closing line of Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides, but by the time it came along it mostly served to prove that the band had taken in some pop culture since the mid-nineties.