Manic Street Preachers - This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours

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Free Music Notes for This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours

Free Music Review: Tied with The Holy Bible for best Manics album.
Hit: 5 Stars

We start with "The Everlasting." This is impossible not to like - Bradfield's voice has a beautiful melancholy quality to it, the strings are great, and the lyrics are pure genius. Some may say Nicky Wire's lyrics don't match those of Richey James - I'd say otherwise, even if the Wire does write utterly daft things once in a while. But here there's nothing to criticize - "The world is full of refugees" is a great line that for some reason reminds me of Hemingway. Okay. After that gorgeous song, we hit "If You Tolerate," a song about the Spanish civil war (thus also reminding me of Hemingway), which I already mentioned rules. From here we go through 11 more tracks. Some of these are great, some merely good, and a couple not too impressive, but almost all of them are bursting with emotion and sheer musicality. Bradfield and Moore show immense musical inventiveness here - witness the smashing organ line in "Ready for Drowning," the predatory drums of "SYMM," the lovely violins of "Black Dog" or the piano work in "You're Tender And You're Tired." Bradfield shows himself to be one of rock's best singers, and Wire's lyrics range from asinine ("Delirium on helium") to breathtakingly great ("No vendettas, just a cherry blossom tree"). The thing is, these songs take time to grow on you. Give it a chance. With repeated listens, the sonic details come out, the lyrics catch hold, and we see that every song leads perfectly into the next. The only song on the album that really doesn't work is the overly long, aptly named "I'm Not Working," but all the others have at least something going for them.

Another reason why this album takes time to appreciate fully is that its emotional territory isn't as immediate as on other Manics albums. The Holy Bible gripped you by the throat; This Is My Truth does not. But over repeated listens, you see that there is just as much emotion here as before; it's just subtle, and expressed differently. Wire deals with personal, down-to-earth issues - "Black Dog" is, in his own words, an attempt to write about depression in an unglamorous light. This at first makes the song seem irrelevant, but eventually it comes to be extremely resonant because Wire succeeds in making it realistic - most people aren't theatrical and rock-star-like about their depression. The same feeling of dreary melancholy permeates "My Little Empire," and also works very well. Many other emotions, however, are evoked by other songs, such as the exultant "Tsunami," the eerie, ominous "SYMM," or the uplifting "You're Tender." But "Ready for Drowning" and "If You Tolerate" show that the Manics haven't abandoned their social commentary - it's just that they no longer feel it necessary to scream it in our ears, and that in this album it's secondary to more personal issues. Illustrating this, "You Stole the Sun" masks very naked loneliness beneath very sunny hooks (so sunny that the lyrics hit even harder when you do realize what they mean), and "Born A Girl" is a painful, aching gem of a song with a beautifully understated vocal from Bradfield. And _then_ there's "Nobody Loved You," Wire's best lyric to date. It's a song about the missing Richey James but it will resonate with anyone who has ever lost someone. Great music, great performance, great lyrics with absolutely unforgettable imagery. Utterly beautiful.

After the all-out rawk of Everything Must Go, it took guts to make this album. But they did it, and it worked. They slagged it off now in interviews for some reason. That's too bad because it's great. The Holy Bible and Everything Must Go are indispensable, don't get me wrong - in fact, almost all Manics records are - but this is a very, very good album indeed, and does not deserve the flak it has received. Thumbs up.

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