Manic Street Preachers - Critical Thinking

Having accepted their days of hit singles are behind them, Manic Street Preachers have nonetheless continued releasing albums at a regular tic, and 'Critical Thinking', their fifteenth, finds them scratching their heads at the cultural landscape they find themselves in.

On the title-track, over motorik drums and post-punk guitars, Nicky Wire rails against the abundance of wellness and therapy speak even as we hand over so much of ourselves to automation. Though there’s a point to be made, Wire’s blunt delivery comes off slightly jarring given their previous knack for nestling their politics into Top 10 earworms.

More familiar then is the soaring single ‘Decline and Fall’, led by James Dean Bradfield’s trademark guitar and more melodic vocals, before Wire redeems himself, singing a gorgeous lead on hooky ‘Hiding in Plain Sight’.

In a counterpoint to the opener’s negativity, ‘Dear Stephen’ observes, “It’s so easy to hate, it takes guts to be kind”. Once acerbic polemicists, here the Manics’ passion for the things they do value (paintings, postcards, books, memory), as on ‘Late Day Peaks’, is now far more affecting than hearing them reeling off a checklist of modern errors as on closer ‘One Man Militia’, where despite the latter’s urgent instrumental Wire acknowledges “I sound like a dying corpse”.

That contradiction between alternately cherishing things they love, vanishing from the world, and bitterly scorning the cold digitisation that’s swept it away, creates a tension in its heart which, despite rarely tesselating, gives this record its purpose.