Post by thehitparade on Dec 1, 2013 1:54:03 GMT 1
OK, I'm going down to the wire again (no pun intended) but I did relisten to the album earlier today so I'm all set to go ahead. The Manics were only slightly on my radar pre-96; sure I'd heard the name (it was hard to forget) but all I knew of them was that they'd done some really dark stuff which I wouldn't (yet) have been interested in and that one of them had gone missing.
Still, if like me you were in your late teens in the spring-summer of 1996 and you had any interest in rock music, Everything Must Go was the album to have. Well, I say "have" - actually I borrowed it from a fellow sixth-former because, younger readers, we used to have these things called "cassettes" onto which you could record music, and the 45 minutes duration of this album was a perfect fit for one side of one. I did buy the previous three albums fairly soon afterwards as funds allowed, but I must admit I didn't get round to buying this one, and didn't technically speaking acquire my own copy of the album until the tenth-anniversary re-issue. I knew it better than many of the albums I did buy though.
Elvis Impersonator: Blackpool Pier was an odd choice of opener though, perhaps intentionally so. It's one of the handful of songs to feature lyrical input from the departed Richey James (with Nicky Wire on this occasion) but that obvious link to the band's past is in contrast to the entirely unprecedented soundscape, with the song floating into view with distant sound effects of the impersonator singing over a cheap organ. The lead instruments on the intro proper are harps and acoustic guitars, neither of them prominently used in former incarnations of the group. Perhaps it's a statement of intent to show how changed the band are in their new trio format - it's audibly much bigger budget than anything from The Holy Bible but at the same time it's not a track you could really call commercial or accessible. For one thing it's the only track on the album to contain swearing, and on at least one occasion I heard this being skipped when the album was being played in a record shop and an older customer walked in.
As to the lyrics, their unsympathetic portrait of an Englishman impersonating a deceased American rock star claim to be "so f***ing funny" but actually they're more venemous, especially when James Dean Bradfield spits out the phrase "limited face paint" (also highlighted in the album sleeve). Presumably it's some sort of comment on the transatlantic Special Relationship or possibly on other hard-rock bands whom they'd have seen as their peers, though the details are opaque.
Incidentally, Mrs Hitparade, one of the few Americans to have bought this album, once told me that the phrase "dyed black quiff" might not be interpreted with quite the same meaning over there as was intended.
Though I was tardy about buying the album, I did pick up the CD single of A Design For Life the day it came out, in its rather beautiful sleeve. My dad was impressed by this choice. It's commonplace to talk of rock songs as "anthemic" but few are so literally so as this, a song that literally sounds like one in its composition and nods to the real thing with its powerful string arrangement. None of this is likely to be coincidental, since Nicky Wire's lyric (presumably written first) is obviously supposed to be an anthem for the defiant working classes, ironically boasting "We don't talk about love/We only want to get drunk", though whether everyone singing along in the Britpop era totally got the irony is debatable. The sentiment and irony, if nothing else, remind me a bit of Jarvis Cocker and Pulp, also misfits who were accidentally co-opted into the Britpop movement.
It's also on this track that we hear the skills of producer Mike Hedges, who apparently got this gig off the back of doing 'Yes' by McAlmont & Butler (no relation to the Manics song of the same title) and applies a similarly big ambience to this. Sean Moore's thunderous drums and percussion get their own feature slot at the end of the track. The only trouble is that I've heard this song so many times now it's hard to even notice it.
Kevin Carter was an instant favourite for me when I first heard the album, and when ultimately released as the album's third single later that year it became the only Top 10 hit to feature significant input from Richey; it's a safe bet that he didn't play on the 1992 version of 'Theme From MASH'. I'd never heard of Kevin Carter before and in the days before Google it was a while before I even realised he was a real person. It's hard not to imagine that Richey in some way identified with a man who struggled with his own past and success - and who ultimately killed himself. As I said earlier in the thread, we have to allow some dramatic licence for the line "Click click click click click, click himself under" as a blend of his photography and suicide. Since the remaining Manics made a choice not to use any of Richey's lyrics that he weren't already planned for release at the time of his disappearance, they were presumably unwilling to do much editing of them either, which is one reason why JDB is stuck with some difficult stuff so sing: his pronunciation of "Hi Pulitzer Prize" on this track is a notorious example. Sean Moore gets another surprise star turn with his trumpet solo. I don't know whose idea that was but it's hard to imagine it being tried on any previous Manics album.
Though Enola/Alone is a Nicky Wire solo lyric, it's one of the more straightforward rock tracks on the album, and it also hints at the past with its use of wordplay: the 1994 single 'Revol' was originally called 'Revol/Lover'. I always wondered whether there was also some sort of reference to the Enola Gay intended (note the "hundred percent risk of stepping outside") but on the other hand the lyric "please sing to me a song" in the chorus is distractingly awkward and this was never a favourite of mine.
Title track Everything Must Go brings back the big string section with a vengence and loads on even more Moore to give a Spector-like Wall Of Sound effect. Presumably this is why it was released as the follow-up to 'A Design For Life', though it's a deserved hit in its own right. Supposedly it's a song about privatisation, although at least subconsciously it seems to refer to the band's own need to "escape from our history".
Unsurprisingly, Small Black Flowers That Grow In The Sky is another Richey James song, though what he'd have made of the cleanly-recorded acoustic guitars and harps we can only guess. Whatever he'd have thought, though, I love it as that prettiness sharpens the focus on his harrowing lyric, a lament for animals mistreated by humans. Though by all accounts this was an issue that he felt strongly about in itself, it's impossible not to think of him identifying in some way with the battery hen, just as he did with the prostitutes in 'Yes' (the Manics one not the McAlmont & Butler one).
Side Two starts with The Girl Who Wanted To Be God, and I've always enjoyed the first moments of the track, with its faintly discofied rhythm guitar and cymbals interrupted by a one-note bassline. I like the ending too, but unfortunately the song in the middle reveals itself as a musical rewrite of 'Motorcycle Emptiness' with a bigger budget but less inspiration. The lyrics aren't exceptional either and I imagine that it was sentiment (this being a James/Wire text) that kept this on the album rather than seeing it relegated to a B-side.
The album version is a remix of an original production by Stephen Hague, better known for his work with electronic acts like New Order and Pet Shop Boys. That original turned out not to be radically different, which might be why it wasn't fully re-recorded. Perhaps they struggled to get the song right in any format because it wasn't really that strong to start with. Probably my least favourite on the album.
I seem to like Removables more than most people here, though with hindsight I wouldn't class it as a highlight. I think I liked it more at first because its mood and sound are a little bit different from the rest of the album. In fact the arrangement and Bradfield's slightly hushed vocal give it an almost light-hearted quality, at least until you realise he's singing things like "Killed God blood soiled unclean again". Unsurprisingly that's a Richey lyric, his last in the sequence. Another imaginative ending to the track, as it gradually stumbles to a close.
When Australia was released as the album's fourth and final single in December 1996, they became the only domestic act to score four UK Top 10 singles that year. Possibly this track was held back to the last single because it had the best chance of managing that, being the closest the album comes to conventional rock-anthem territory, complete with radio-friendly production and a big, attention-grabbing intro. Like the previous track it's not quite all it seems on the surface, being an emotional song about anxiety. It was a song I did get a bit tired of at the time, though I can listen to it again now.
Interiors (Song For Willem Do Kooning) is jointly the longest track on the album (at 4 minutes 19 though, no prog epics here) and continues the band's habit of writing a song about a disease (Alzheimer's in this case) on every album. As an attempt to represent modernist painting through music it's one of the album's less successful tracks though in any case it suffers from the fact that it's ten tracks in and the typical style is becoming less exciting.
Penultimate track Further Away ups the energy a bit and also breaks new ground for the band in that it's openly a love song, something they once claimed they'd never do. Hardly the first time they'd broken such an embargo though. As one of the poppier songs it benefits from Hedges' production. It was released as a single in Japan and could probably have been a hit here if they'd bothered. Wouldn't have been worth losing any of the other singles for though.
Perhaps No Surface All Feeling is the most old-Manics sounding track on here. It's the one song that Mike Hedges didn't touch, it was recorded at a small Cardiff studio with their long-term producer Dave Eringa. Reportedly Richey James himself even plays on the track's outro (a very rare event on a studio recording), though it was obviously finished without him. Still, this adds a certain circularity to putting the track at the very end of the album. Mind you, the song's mood of emotional catharsis makes a perfect fit at the end anyway, and it also leaves you with a much better impression of the album after the patchy second side. It's one track I could imagine would have made a fine single.
It's partly because of the importance of things like sequencing (see above) that I'm reluctant to give numerical ratings to individual tracks. In the end, the album is greater than the sum of its (mostly rather good) parts, as well as of the times.
For me, this album and The Holy Bible are a combined peak for the Manics, so different it's hard to say which is actually better but this is certainly the most enjoyable album they've ever made. A solid 8/10 for me.
Still, if like me you were in your late teens in the spring-summer of 1996 and you had any interest in rock music, Everything Must Go was the album to have. Well, I say "have" - actually I borrowed it from a fellow sixth-former because, younger readers, we used to have these things called "cassettes" onto which you could record music, and the 45 minutes duration of this album was a perfect fit for one side of one. I did buy the previous three albums fairly soon afterwards as funds allowed, but I must admit I didn't get round to buying this one, and didn't technically speaking acquire my own copy of the album until the tenth-anniversary re-issue. I knew it better than many of the albums I did buy though.
Elvis Impersonator: Blackpool Pier was an odd choice of opener though, perhaps intentionally so. It's one of the handful of songs to feature lyrical input from the departed Richey James (with Nicky Wire on this occasion) but that obvious link to the band's past is in contrast to the entirely unprecedented soundscape, with the song floating into view with distant sound effects of the impersonator singing over a cheap organ. The lead instruments on the intro proper are harps and acoustic guitars, neither of them prominently used in former incarnations of the group. Perhaps it's a statement of intent to show how changed the band are in their new trio format - it's audibly much bigger budget than anything from The Holy Bible but at the same time it's not a track you could really call commercial or accessible. For one thing it's the only track on the album to contain swearing, and on at least one occasion I heard this being skipped when the album was being played in a record shop and an older customer walked in.
As to the lyrics, their unsympathetic portrait of an Englishman impersonating a deceased American rock star claim to be "so f***ing funny" but actually they're more venemous, especially when James Dean Bradfield spits out the phrase "limited face paint" (also highlighted in the album sleeve). Presumably it's some sort of comment on the transatlantic Special Relationship or possibly on other hard-rock bands whom they'd have seen as their peers, though the details are opaque.
Incidentally, Mrs Hitparade, one of the few Americans to have bought this album, once told me that the phrase "dyed black quiff" might not be interpreted with quite the same meaning over there as was intended.
Though I was tardy about buying the album, I did pick up the CD single of A Design For Life the day it came out, in its rather beautiful sleeve. My dad was impressed by this choice. It's commonplace to talk of rock songs as "anthemic" but few are so literally so as this, a song that literally sounds like one in its composition and nods to the real thing with its powerful string arrangement. None of this is likely to be coincidental, since Nicky Wire's lyric (presumably written first) is obviously supposed to be an anthem for the defiant working classes, ironically boasting "We don't talk about love/We only want to get drunk", though whether everyone singing along in the Britpop era totally got the irony is debatable. The sentiment and irony, if nothing else, remind me a bit of Jarvis Cocker and Pulp, also misfits who were accidentally co-opted into the Britpop movement.
It's also on this track that we hear the skills of producer Mike Hedges, who apparently got this gig off the back of doing 'Yes' by McAlmont & Butler (no relation to the Manics song of the same title) and applies a similarly big ambience to this. Sean Moore's thunderous drums and percussion get their own feature slot at the end of the track. The only trouble is that I've heard this song so many times now it's hard to even notice it.
Kevin Carter was an instant favourite for me when I first heard the album, and when ultimately released as the album's third single later that year it became the only Top 10 hit to feature significant input from Richey; it's a safe bet that he didn't play on the 1992 version of 'Theme From MASH'. I'd never heard of Kevin Carter before and in the days before Google it was a while before I even realised he was a real person. It's hard not to imagine that Richey in some way identified with a man who struggled with his own past and success - and who ultimately killed himself. As I said earlier in the thread, we have to allow some dramatic licence for the line "Click click click click click, click himself under" as a blend of his photography and suicide. Since the remaining Manics made a choice not to use any of Richey's lyrics that he weren't already planned for release at the time of his disappearance, they were presumably unwilling to do much editing of them either, which is one reason why JDB is stuck with some difficult stuff so sing: his pronunciation of "Hi Pulitzer Prize" on this track is a notorious example. Sean Moore gets another surprise star turn with his trumpet solo. I don't know whose idea that was but it's hard to imagine it being tried on any previous Manics album.
Though Enola/Alone is a Nicky Wire solo lyric, it's one of the more straightforward rock tracks on the album, and it also hints at the past with its use of wordplay: the 1994 single 'Revol' was originally called 'Revol/Lover'. I always wondered whether there was also some sort of reference to the Enola Gay intended (note the "hundred percent risk of stepping outside") but on the other hand the lyric "please sing to me a song" in the chorus is distractingly awkward and this was never a favourite of mine.
Title track Everything Must Go brings back the big string section with a vengence and loads on even more Moore to give a Spector-like Wall Of Sound effect. Presumably this is why it was released as the follow-up to 'A Design For Life', though it's a deserved hit in its own right. Supposedly it's a song about privatisation, although at least subconsciously it seems to refer to the band's own need to "escape from our history".
Unsurprisingly, Small Black Flowers That Grow In The Sky is another Richey James song, though what he'd have made of the cleanly-recorded acoustic guitars and harps we can only guess. Whatever he'd have thought, though, I love it as that prettiness sharpens the focus on his harrowing lyric, a lament for animals mistreated by humans. Though by all accounts this was an issue that he felt strongly about in itself, it's impossible not to think of him identifying in some way with the battery hen, just as he did with the prostitutes in 'Yes' (the Manics one not the McAlmont & Butler one).
Side Two starts with The Girl Who Wanted To Be God, and I've always enjoyed the first moments of the track, with its faintly discofied rhythm guitar and cymbals interrupted by a one-note bassline. I like the ending too, but unfortunately the song in the middle reveals itself as a musical rewrite of 'Motorcycle Emptiness' with a bigger budget but less inspiration. The lyrics aren't exceptional either and I imagine that it was sentiment (this being a James/Wire text) that kept this on the album rather than seeing it relegated to a B-side.
The album version is a remix of an original production by Stephen Hague, better known for his work with electronic acts like New Order and Pet Shop Boys. That original turned out not to be radically different, which might be why it wasn't fully re-recorded. Perhaps they struggled to get the song right in any format because it wasn't really that strong to start with. Probably my least favourite on the album.
I seem to like Removables more than most people here, though with hindsight I wouldn't class it as a highlight. I think I liked it more at first because its mood and sound are a little bit different from the rest of the album. In fact the arrangement and Bradfield's slightly hushed vocal give it an almost light-hearted quality, at least until you realise he's singing things like "Killed God blood soiled unclean again". Unsurprisingly that's a Richey lyric, his last in the sequence. Another imaginative ending to the track, as it gradually stumbles to a close.
When Australia was released as the album's fourth and final single in December 1996, they became the only domestic act to score four UK Top 10 singles that year. Possibly this track was held back to the last single because it had the best chance of managing that, being the closest the album comes to conventional rock-anthem territory, complete with radio-friendly production and a big, attention-grabbing intro. Like the previous track it's not quite all it seems on the surface, being an emotional song about anxiety. It was a song I did get a bit tired of at the time, though I can listen to it again now.
Interiors (Song For Willem Do Kooning) is jointly the longest track on the album (at 4 minutes 19 though, no prog epics here) and continues the band's habit of writing a song about a disease (Alzheimer's in this case) on every album. As an attempt to represent modernist painting through music it's one of the album's less successful tracks though in any case it suffers from the fact that it's ten tracks in and the typical style is becoming less exciting.
Penultimate track Further Away ups the energy a bit and also breaks new ground for the band in that it's openly a love song, something they once claimed they'd never do. Hardly the first time they'd broken such an embargo though. As one of the poppier songs it benefits from Hedges' production. It was released as a single in Japan and could probably have been a hit here if they'd bothered. Wouldn't have been worth losing any of the other singles for though.
Perhaps No Surface All Feeling is the most old-Manics sounding track on here. It's the one song that Mike Hedges didn't touch, it was recorded at a small Cardiff studio with their long-term producer Dave Eringa. Reportedly Richey James himself even plays on the track's outro (a very rare event on a studio recording), though it was obviously finished without him. Still, this adds a certain circularity to putting the track at the very end of the album. Mind you, the song's mood of emotional catharsis makes a perfect fit at the end anyway, and it also leaves you with a much better impression of the album after the patchy second side. It's one track I could imagine would have made a fine single.
It's partly because of the importance of things like sequencing (see above) that I'm reluctant to give numerical ratings to individual tracks. In the end, the album is greater than the sum of its (mostly rather good) parts, as well as of the times.
For me, this album and The Holy Bible are a combined peak for the Manics, so different it's hard to say which is actually better but this is certainly the most enjoyable album they've ever made. A solid 8/10 for me.