A Punch in the Chest from Manic Street Preachers

Raise your fist if you felt a small twinge of satisfaction when you saw Charles and Camilla's limo crashing into real life two weeks ago in London. Much as I truly hate to see anybody suffering from fear and distress -- even upper class twits -- perspective tells me that for the other 99 per cent of a nation hurtling towards third-world status, the fear and distress is on a somewhat different scale.

Not to get ranty or too hung up on the symbolism of the moment, but the picture of the year offers a nice preamble to my album of the year, a record from a long-established British group that stylishly weaves the political into the personal at a truly crucial time, all while speaking to the weighty mythology of the band itself. I've written about Manic Street Preachers here before, and I'll make no bones over the fact that I've loved them for close to 20 years. But a great album is a great album.

Postcards from a Young Man is the Manics in shamelessly commercial mode after the dark interiors of last year's Journal for Plague Lovers. String sections, choirs, and monstrous hooks blow through the record, carried on huge gusts of guitar, and every drum fill is a punch to the chest. It's brazenly emotional. But it's not cheap. The Welsh three-piece is too natively perverse, too thorny, too inherently hard-nosed, and too marinated in its working class origins to make something pandering or manipulative; or to put it another way, where another band might be good at theatrical passion (hello, Arcade Fire!), the Manics are full of real heart.

If there's a theme to Postcards, it lies somewhere between the middle-age melancholy of the title track -- "This life, it sucks your principles away, you have to fight against it every day" -- and a general apprehension that civilization is well past the point of Peak Shit. I can't recall a recent mainstream record that uses the word "despair" quite so often, and yet a bug-eyed rave against technology is smuggled into a song as ecstatic sounding as "A Billion Balconies Facing the Sun." This arch-dynamic runs through the whole record. With "Auto-Intoxication," the band softens its post-punk side and leaves you cheerily humming along with lyrics about economic collapse and debt slavery. The "insides of our nation have been exposed" in the thoroughly disgusted "All We Make is Entertainment," but you could easily picture Wizzard tackling the same song in glitter-clown face paint on Top of the Pops circa 1973.

"Golden Platitudes" is the album centrepiece. Building on the sentiments of the title track, the Manics then artfully volley between private anguish and a larger indictment of Britain's power structure; specifically -- I think -- all the wretched betrayals of Blair and New Labour. I recommend listening to "Golden Platitudes" while taking a good look at Charles and Camilla confronting the future. But the sentiments are universal, of course, and maybe my closer interpretation is wrong. So we'll let the band have the last word. This is what I mean by heart: "Why colonise the moon / When every different kind / Of desperation exists / In every single home? / Where did the feeling go? / Where did the feeling go? / Where did it all go wrong?"

[Editor's Note: As per Tyee tradition in recent years, we've closed the comment section for the holidays. Thank you all for creating such a thoughtful, alive and insightful conversation this year. We look forward to more of the same in the next. To you and yours, we wish you a music-filled happy holiday!]