Manic Street Preachers - Postcards from a Young Man

Last year, Manic Street Preachers did something pretty impressive - they managed to reverse the downward trend their work had been showing since Know Your Enemy and they produced an album that was genuinely in keeping with their best album - The Holy Bible. It was as if having their missing band member's lyrics to work with forced them to raise they game and see if they could again achieve the heights they did in the mid-nineties. Journal For Plague Lovers was good - it was very good. And I hoped it might be a true reversal in their slow, but still tangible, artistic decline. Unfortunately, Postcards from a Young Man suggests it was just a positive blip, not a reversal.

Because their most recent effort doesn't just show the Manics heading for the safe ground - it shows them putting down their heads a sprinting for it like there is no tomorrow. This is safe Manics; as a result it, it is largely bland anthems with repetitive lyrics and pretensions towards politically aware slogans. And fans will have heard these songs before - maybe not exactly the same tunes or the same lyrics, but these songs will be very familiar to anyone who has heard, say, Send Away the Tigers. It comes to something when Ian McCulloch can effortlessly duet with James Dean Bradfield and it sounds like the most normal thing in the world (at one point, McCulloch even starts singing the Echo and the Bunnymen song "Never Stop"!) That's what the Manics increasingly sounds like - post-reformation Echo and the Bunnymen. Not the worst thing in the world by any stretch of the imagination, but equally not the most memorable either.

Don't get me wrong - this is still an enjoyable album. And a Manic Street Preachers anthem will also sound a lot better than, say, the dirge like "anthems" of Oasis. It is all there - the great guitar playing, the energetic singing, the sweeping strings. But - and I'm going to say it again - we've heard this before. This album - it's an echo of Everything Must Go. And it lacks that album's urgency and the desire of the band to prove itself.

Increasingly, the Manics resemble the Who around the time of Who Are You and Face Dances. They are still capable of turning in memorable songs, but they're doing it because they're a band and that's what bands do - rather than doing it because they feel an urge to make music. As a result, the sad truth is the Manics are still worth listening to, but all this album shows is that they are a shadow of their former selves. Some of the band have called this "one last shot at mass communication", and maybe that's what this album should be - their last.