Talk, if you so desire, about _The Holy Bible_ by the Manic Street Preachers

?!?! What, they captured Santa's helpers and beat the crap out of them?

Just broke this out yesterday after 15 years of barely playing it, even though I loved it in high school. I was surprised at how disturbing, nihilistic, and chilling it was. I remember reading the reviews in the mid-90s describing it as "harrowing", and even though I must have listened to this album 500+ times since, I somehow never really sensed that quality so acutely as yesterday. Still, I found it a brilliant listen. The basswork is pretty good too!

I still remember literally every word of this album but I haven't listened to it in full for a long, long time.

"4st7lb", while "smaller" in scope lyricswise and less overtly political than most songs on the album, might be the most harrowing of them all. It's been 15 years, but I'll never forget listening to it when one of my friends in secondary school got anorexia and was in hospital for a year. Very powerful song.

I see '4st. 7lb' as one of Richey's best ever lyrics. When people talk about Richey Edwards, that's the lyric that I think of first. I think it's one of his most direct too, which makes it all the more powerful.

OTM re: direct. Plus, it strikes me as maybe the most personal and honest of all his lyrics. Definitely among his best.

yeah, that one in particular gave me the chills. it took me a long time to understand the intro quote too:

"I eat too much to die, and not enough to stay alive. I'm in the middle, waiting."

Getting shivers down my spine typing that.

Getting shivers down my spine reading it.

So they're bringing the album tour they did last year in the UK to the US, East Coast dates went on sale a couple of weeks back and they added LA and San Francisco dates that just went on sale. Finally seeing them for the first time overall.

seeing them in toronto in april, pretty stoked

Nice! I know Brad says he's going to a show.

Saw them in '98 for their very brief 'This is My Truth' tour. Nicky was hot.

and i'm saying this as a heterosexual male... he somehow had a way with a feathered boa.

For some reason I find the idea of the Manics touring The Holy Bible in 2014/2015 hilarious coming from a band that wrote a song called 'Nostalgic Pushead'.

also, they were supposed to break up after releasing their first album, which was to be the greatest album known to man or something. I'm a fan of them (at least the THB - EMG - TIMTTMY trilogy), but everything about their career path is kind of rich with irony.

otoh they're one of the only bands from that era still making interesting records

In fairness they clearly agonised over playing the album in full and appeared to do it genuinely because they felt it was appropriate. If they were merely about nostalgia, they would have just waited for Everything Must Go

richey's disappearance prevented them from touring the album here in 1995, so i think there's an element of personal closure involved.

damn, might have to go to the Toronto show...

Meantime, here's a little something I've been trying to figure out what to do with for years.

My interview with James Dean Bradfield from the abortive US press tour which Richey never went on.

http://thequietus.com/articles/17436-manic-street-preachers-holy-bible-james-dean-bradfield-interview

btw this show was amaaazing

I would say I was jealous but since I'm seeing them next Saturday, merely anticipatory. What other songs did they play?

the hits!

Nice.

great video if you want to see how to play some MSP songs on guitar. I didn't realize JDB did so many alternate tunings! "This is Yesterday" is in open G and is incredibly fun to play.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gslKjS155Q

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-gateway-drug-on-triptych-three-studies-of-manic-street-preachers-the-holy-bible/

as part of what I would have to assume is the extremely small north american audience for that book I'm pretty surprised to see it covered in the LARB

English author, so a little less surprising -- still, nice to see.

this album sounds fucking amazing right now

It always does but I kid the etc. But yeah, it would.

the ending of "archives of pain" is so cool

Archives of Pain sounds amazing, but I find the lyrics annoy me too much to let me really enjoy it.

i had a bad feeling back in 2016 when i realized that two of the ppl mentioned in the chorus of archives of pain were alive and had endorsed donald trump

(zhirinovsky, le pen)

does anything else really sound like this album? even the manics never really did anything that had this particular sound (apart from journal for plague lovers, which is a conscious throwback/homage to THB and richey). i listened to joy division's closer for the first time in a while the other day and "a means to an end" did strike me as something that had influenced the sound of THB, but i can't think of much else.

nothing else sounds like either mix of this album, no, AFAICT. it was self-produced, right? the drums in particular sound so cool. Sean Moore was an absolute god on this.

if anyone's not heard the three outtakes they're all amazing, tbh they were all worthy of inclusion

this might end up being the only summer where this sounds like a summer album

For Archives of Pain - the pro death penalty song from a so called liberal/ socialist band - UTTERLY FUCKING DUD.

I don't think the song is meant to be pro-death penalty, though it's not exactly ironic either. Seems their intention is to fully inhabit this other perspective, commit to it strongly enough that their own view is almost undermined, or at least ambiguous. They do this all over the record, "fuck the brady bill" is another one.

Since James is the singer but not the lyricist, there's a space between the words and the delivery that's exploited to ths effect. James is totally committed.

LOL at the post that said Richey's lyrics were unoriginal.

yeah I think this is well trod territory by now but I think Richey's main thing was prodding at liberals' comfort zones and acknowledging the allure/"purity" of extreme right-wing positions, but neither is remotely the same as advocating for them. it's another one of those things that makes this record so singular, James' utterly committed barking with Richey's dense and deeply ironic lyrics.

lol i was gonna make the same point but y'all did it better than me

Archives of Pain and "fuck the brady bill" are well over the line into edgelord territory IMO, also "when I was young PC meant police constable / nowadays I can't seem to tell the difference" is just hilariously bad. I believe Nicky is responsible for a couple of these, but Richey bears some responsibility for sure. It doesn't spoil the LP, but it does add this kind of petulent juvenile edge to it, which shouldn't be there.

there are left-wing arguments against gun control, though i've never really been sure what "fuck the brady bill" meant in the context of that song. the police constable line is bad but the rest of PCP feels like it's largely directed against right-wing/statist policies (banning shakespeare, opposing euthanasia, calling anti-choice policies "pro-life"). it's also hard to know how to take a "critique" of political correctness when it comes with lines like "king cigarette snuffed out by her midgets."

i agree that "inhabiting other perspectives" is the best way to understand the lyrics on THB. i remember in some interview around this time richey told simon price that he admired the harsh sharia law regime in sudan. even nicky said that he didn't quite understand what some of richey's lyrics meant, so i think there's always going to be some ambiguity there.

"PCP" always felt to me like "fuck, there's only one song left on this thing, lemme cram in as many contrarian statements I may or may not believe in under four minutes as possible". And I've always enjoyed it that way!

I also don't think you can understand the political mixed messaging on this without noting the non-political stuff from the same sessions like "This Is Yesterday" or "Too Cold Here". I've never got the sense listening to this that Richey derived a ton of fun from playing devil's advocate or whatever.

Honestly, all this runs deeper than politics (and certainly deeper than devil's advocacy, yeah).

i've never really been sure what "fuck the brady bill" meant in the context of that song.

Well, the other part of that lyric is "If god made man they say/ Sam Colt made him an equal."
This is a theme they revisit a few times from different angles:
"If man makes death, death makes man"
"God gives life, god taketh it away, not you."

It's about judgement. The fundamental question at the core of The Holy Bible may be 'who has the authority to judge?'
and it doesn't take a clear stance on this. It's really more concerned with raising and investigating the question, and the album both examines and demonstrates in deeply unsettling ways how moral judgement can be both dehumanizing and empowering. Perhaps *especially* on the more intmate material like 4st 7lbs.
Trying to pin down the band's political stance is the wrong approach to this record IMHO. It's far too distrurbing to be taken as a ringing endorsement of anything, but it's equally immersive and compelling. If THB is overtly against anything, it's complacency.

By the way, I think Journal for Plague Lovers is closer to the sound of Generation Terrorists, and probably closer still to their earlier day-glo punk stuff like New Art Riot than THB. There are passages that refer very explicitly to THB, like the Peeled Apples intro and riff, Bag Lady... JDB invented a singular musical language for this album that seems designed to unsettle. Brittle metallic textures, nauseating modulation fx, bII chords that undermine the sense of key, Klezmer harmony - I don't hear any of that on Journal. It's a much straighter hard rock sound.

The Klezmer stuff evokes the religious element, but also the Eastern European landscape, WW2. It hammers you over the head with Holocaust imagery, really.

If there's a heavier album in all of r'n'r I haven't heard it yet.

What's an example of klezmer harmony on this? Never picked up on that influence.

So, I do think the brief lead guitar break and solo in Archives of Pain are supposed to evoke a Klezmer dirge, probably more in approximation than any studied imitation. That's the one I had in mind, but... are there others? I thought there were several, but glancing at the tracklist now, I don't recall any others. Sorry to disappoint!

lol no worries

I do agree w brad that this perfect album sounds exceptionally perfect and prescient at this time. I think I've said this elsewhere but JDB's overall work on this album is unbelievable and that sometimes gets overlooked amidst the tragedy of it all.

I think the view that it's James's masterpiece has been gaining traction? I haven't read much about this band tbh, at the time I was more plugged in most articles concerned the resentment of "old fans" toward new fans who got onboard with everything must go.

It's a major masterpiece album and James deserves a great deal of the credit for that, yeah.

Agreed that PCP is basically a postcript. It's the lightest track on there by far. Probably a necessary measure.

"fuck the brady bill" was inspired by the "left" libertarian canard that the bill was intended to strip gun rights from poor african americans. (citation needed)

the language might be blunt but "gun control efforts by a racist system disproportionately impacts black people" is a pretty defensible take

https://blogs.ischool.berkeley.edu/w231/2018/02/27/racial-bias-in-the-national-instant-criminal-background-check-system/

It may be Richie’s brainchild, but JDB’s soul carries the vision. Wouldn’t have worked otherwise.

And I agree that many of Richie's lyrics look unsingable on the page, so that's an even greater feat in JDB's case

The way that they force the lyrics to fit the vocal melodies has always struck me as pretty singular and something I'm surprised doesn't get mentioned more. (I know only their early albums and have no idea if they continued doing this.)

oh they did

yes it just evolved from "how do I make a song from this inscrutable polemic" to "how do I make a song from nicky wire listing off his collection of posters"

"fuck the brady bill" was inspired by the "left" libertarian canard that the bill was intended to strip gun rights from poor african americans. (citation needed)
the language might be blunt but "gun control efforts by a racist system disproportionately impacts black people" is a pretty defensible take

https://blogs.ischool.berkeley.edu/w231/2018/02/27/racial-bias-in-the-national-instant-criminal-background-check-system/

. That's a convincing take on the line in the context of the song. So the idea is Sam Colt made men equal (to one another). It was another footnote after all...

Dissing the guy who inadvertently video taped the Kennedy assassination seems uncalled for tho - any ideas what that one's about?

'Assassination porn' is my best guess.

Like, comparing the fascination with the Zapruder tape to pornography. Abraham Zapruder was the first to watch it in private. Idk.

like being able to watch the crucifixion on repeat

Wow. Glad I asked, thx Brad

Been thinking about this album and thread in the last couple of days (I don't dare listen, it's like opening pandora's box). Assumed the prescience referred to had something to do with covid-19 LOL. Not sure why I thought that since the conversation here highlights its relevance to this particular moment: That reducing everything to opposing dualities/binaries is bullshit and reality is a clusterfuck.
Duh. Embarrassingly slow on the uptake. I mean, I don't even call myself a liberal.

I'm very slow at everything including reading, so I don't read a lot of books. But there were two periods in my life when I read a book every 2 or 3 days. The first one was in the 8th grade, this was the only album in the world that mattered, it was all-enveloping so I went online and found a list of Richey's favorite books and read almost all of them over a period of some months. The thing is, that seems to be the common narrative, seems to be everyone's story about about this record. And people talk about this like it's embarrassing, like it's not absolutely incredible that maybe tens of thousands of kids responded to this album that way.

In terms of the emotional/psychological impact, no other rock music was the same combination of bleak and immersive. I never listened to a lot of metal and the only other music that came close to that for me was gangsta rap. Like I said, I don't dare play this album in certain moods because it's so potent, it usually puts me in a deep funk. But I'm glad that I was 13 and not 35 when I heard this. It's much harder now for music to penetrate like that.