ALBUM REVIEW: Manic Street Preachers – Critical Thinking

The fifteenth studio album from Manic Street Preachers, Critical Thinking, finds the legendary Welsh band laying a positive soundscape while introspectively questioning life through the lyrics. The band have tapped into their influences, ranging from R.E.M. to Lloyd Cole and Glen Campbell to P.i.L., to set an eclectic atmosphere to undergo deep self-analysis.

Bassist Nicky Wire said, “This is a record of opposites colliding – of dialectics trying to find a resolution. While the music has an effervescence and an elegiac uplift, most of the words deal with the cold analysis of the self”.

The album opens with the title track, Critical Thinking, which provides an electronic feel that backs Wire’s spoken word vocals, which he aims at in various aspects of modern society. As he described it, a realisation of “how gullible the human race is”, which finds the song’s chorus posing a question through hypnotic chanting, “What happened to your critical thinking?” The electronic feel continues through Decline and Fall; this time, the familiar vocals of band frontman James Dean Bradfield come to the fore to ponder the past and attempt to look to the future, “I know our time has come and gone”.

The uplifting yet reflective tone of the album is heavily felt on Brush Strokes of Reunion. This song focuses on the “hypnotic quality of a painting inherited from someone who has passed” and lyrically offers emotive lines such as, “I was never ready to feel your pain”. Wire again takes lead vocals on Hiding In Plain Sight, another number that deals with self-reflection, underlined by the desire to “Keep the curtains drawn all day”. A mellow, acoustic beginning soon gives way to a bright vibrancy driven along by Wire’s bass and the determined drumming of Sean Moore.

Bradfield’s most memorable guitar riff on the record comes on People Ruin Paintings, a song the band describes as “musically the three of us playing telepathically, referencing thirty-plus years of playing together instinctively.” Lines such as “People destroy the truth” further underline the band’s suspicious outlook.

There’s an 80’s feel to Dear Stephen, in part inspired by Morrissey and The Smiths, which again takes to task the various aspects of a fractured modern society, although this time looking for positivity, stating, “It’s so easy to hate, it takes guts to be kind”. The ruminative My Brave New Friend poses hypothetical questions such as, “Have you ever walked between the raindrops?” before unleashing deeper ones like, “Have you ever felt a pain so true?” The band’s mood throughout the record is perhaps reflected by the album artwork by world-renowned photographer David Hurn, with Wire describing the wiggling line depicted on a straight road as something that, “evokes these feelings of uncertainty, doubt and desire”, further adding, “the lines on the cover don’t quite connect, mirroring our current dilemma”.

Towards the closing stages of the record, Out of Time Revival offers some of the most prominent guitar licks on an album where they seem far too few and far between, especially with a guitarist of Bradfield’s calibre on board. After which, the penultimate track, Deleted Scenes, once again looks inwardly, with the memorable chorus of, “I prefer the mirror to the screen; it helps me understand the way I feel”, demonstrating how the band is still searching for answers.

Closing track One Man Militia begins by laying an ambience of unease before Wire’s direct vocals take the limelight, with germane lines such as “I’m bored to death of myself, I’m sick of the narratives” and “The truth is a dead disease” leaving a lasting impression. The song features an uplifting, almost anthemic chorus that finishes by asking one final question – “Will they last, or take us under?” to finish the album with something else to contemplate.

Critical Thinking is an album that reflects the later stages of the Manic Street Preachers catalogue; pertinent questions are set out, and answers are demanded over an intricately detailed soundscape. While those tuning in expecting the confrontational rock swagger of their Generation Terrorists debut may be left disappointed, the anger remains but is now presented with a considered elegance.