Album Review: Postcards From A Young Man - Manic Street Preachers

*****
Were 'stars' awarded for sheer ambition, scope and ideas alone, there would certainly be a full set appearing next to every industry review, so engaging is the context of Nicky Wire's desire for a cross-over smash.

However, perhaps that very characteristic is also the one thing that prevents Postcards From A Young Man achieving masterpiece status.

Whereas 1996's Everything Must Go (perhaps the most comparable of their past albums) inevitably rode the wave of enthusiasm for music that would encapsulate the 'Britpop' era, Postcards From A Young Man arrives at a time when the music industry finds itself in considerable decline.

However, it's unfair to label 'Postcards' as merely Everything Must Go 'Part 2' (much as Journal For Plague Lovers was never The Holy Bible Part 2), the album having its own unique identity based on a disillusionment with the modern world and a poetic sense of loss.

Our acquiescence to the digital age in particular comes in for criticism, a virtual existence in which Internet lies "camouflage our screams" and 'Google', the search engine giant, is unmasked as a corporate villain rather than the omnipotent and benevolent 'deity' of our time.

The title track itself revels in the nostalgia of times past, when communication required thought, effort and consideration. When receipt of a postcard would warm the cockles and the Polaroid picture was the height of instant technological gratification.

This clarion call to cherish the physical whilst we still can pervades throughout the album and takes on a further significance in 'All We Make Is Entertainment', a treatise on the sad decline of the UK's manufacturing industry.

It's in such album tracks that the true thematic heart of Postcards For A Young Man is found but that's not to say that when the Manics truly go for broke, as on clear potential single 'Some Kind of Nothingness', there isn't considerable merit to be found too.

That defiance manifests itself here with Ian McCulloch's climactic repetition of, "Never stop" echoing James Dean Bradfield's, "This world will not impose its will/I will not give up and I will not give in!" from the title track again.

'Golden Platitudes' is one of the most musically aspirational songs they've ever put to record, almost Lennonesque in its arrangement and matched by a lyric grappling with New Labour's betrayal of the British public - "the liberal left destroyed every piece of my youth."

Yet, just when you think you're drowning in the lush strings and melody, you're hit by the one-two punch of 'Auto-Intoxication', rumbling in on Bradfield's raging urgency.

Further succour is found on the Nicky Wire sung 'The Future Has Been Here 4 Ever' which on first listen sounds like a misstep but is in fact one of the most surprisingly refreshing moments on the entire record.

It may be naive to hope 'Postcards' crashes onto ipods with the same vigour as CD's once winged their way into the homes of so many, but it's again evidence of the Manics considerable career second wind. A gloriously ambitious rage against the evils of our time and a testament to hope for the future.