Review Summary: We never really went away
The Manic Street Preachers are as reliable as they are unreliable. Now on their twelfth album, the Welsh stalwarts have lived a career defined by context and rallying against the odds, never ones to truly settle down.
Futurology comes just one year after
Rewind The Film, an album that saw the band gazing inwardly at themselves, contemplating their middle-ages and where they are now. It was a record drenched in melancholia and pastoral atmospheres, their most resigned yet. In typical fashion, Futurology might be their most bombastic and extroverted, a love letter to European highways and Simple Minds. The only problem with the Manics ethos is that misfires can and do happen.
Futurology’s musical aesthetic involves shimmering guitars, krautrock-influenced bass and light drums, riffs being drenched in effect pedals until they don’t sound like guitars anymore. The Manics have long freed themselves from constraints and expectations, and it certainly feels good to know they’re revelling in their creative freedom. Songs like “Europa Geht Durch Mich” and “Dreaming A City (Hughesovka)” are some of their weirdest yet, the former being some kind of siren-blaring industrial grind with sloganeering and declarative German vocals from Nina Hoss, the latter being a spaghetti western-influenced instrumental that doesn’t so as much gallop but rather soars off into space. Lyrically, Nicky Wire spends
Futurology reminding listeners of where the band came from politically, a typically hypocritical stance when you consider the weariness of
Rewind The Film. Compare “Let’s go to war to feel some pureness and pain” to “I can’t fight this war anymore, time to surrender, time to move on” from last year’s "This Sullen Welsh Heart".
However, despite the good intentions, oftentimes
Futurology just doesn’t work. This is no strange concept to the Manics (witness the flat and dull atmospherics of 2004’s forgotten
Lifebloood), and in
Futurology, the biggest victim here is ultimately just poor songwriting choices. The opening title-track is always threatening to blow up, but instead stays uncomfortably in the middle-ground with over-produced drums and middling lyrics. “Let’s Go To War” has a snake-like guitar riff straight out of
Public Image Ltd’s
Metal Box, but the chorus never lives up to the rest of the song’s otherwise confrontational aesthetics. Numerous other songs follow this same pattern, of never really lifting off the ground, most of them drowning in over-production and unpleasant guitar effects. It can be somewhat frustrating to listen to, as though you’re listening to a different song as to what you were promised.
Although, as with every disappointing Manics album, there are still gems to uncover. "Walk Me To The Bridge" creeps up on you with its fantastic and explosive refrain, “Sex, Power, Love And Money” is a self-conscious parody of their glam-punk days and it utterly works in how ridiculous it is. The ending of the Gruff Rhys-featuring “Between The Clock And The Bed” is genuinely beautiful. The two instrumentals “Dreaming A City (Hugheskova)” and the closing “Mayakovsky” are genuinely massive, hinting at the sky-high ambitions the band have always been proud to declare, whilst "Europa Geht Durch Mich" is
Futurology living up to its aggressive, confrontational promise, like
Kraftwerk’s
Autobahn beating
Nine Inch Nails into the ground, if it grew up listening to
Generation Terrorists.
The thing with the Manics is, they’ve never been shy to their own failings. Some ideas work, some don’t, it just happens. It’s what makes them always so fascinating to follow. The band have never been one to give in, always one to proudly scream their influences from the goddamn mountains. Manic Street Preachers are one of the most ambitious bands to walk the earth, and it’s what makes even their duds still absolutely essential.
