Manic Street Preachers
Lifeblood (20th Anniversary Edition) SONY The Manics’ least popular album makes a worthy return.
Manic Street Preachers were at a crossroads after tearing down the chart-hogging This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours with a partial return to their rebellious gnarly roots in 2001’s
Know Your Enemy. Rather than continuing to “destroy everything we’d built” for their next record, 2004’s Lifeblood, the Blackwood trio opted to make a fully blown pop album instead.
Inspired by the electro era of 80s New Order and Simple Minds, the Manics toned down the guitars and significantly polished their sound to a glacial sheen that was a million miles away from The Holy Bible’s dark heart. Commercially the record was something of a disaster by their standards, peaking at No.13 in the UK before tumbling out of the album chart within three weeks of its initial release.
But it was by no means the worst album they made. Politically the Manics still had plenty to say, even if their positive spin on a disgraced US president (The Love Of Richard Nixon) raised a few confused eyebrows. And it wasn’t short of a tune or two – Empty Souls and the excellent 1985 were right up there with some of their finest pop anthems. Whether the trio were overshadowed by the sudden explosion of guitar bands in 2004, or the fact that they’d been beaten to the finish line by The
Killers on the electro-pop front, remains a mystery. Either way, their egos had been battered badly, to the point that Nicky Wire thought: “Fucking hell, that’s it.” But of course it wasn’t curtains for the Manics, and they would go on to recapture their anthemic bombast on the next album (Send Away The Tigers).
Unlike 2022’s Know Your Enemy reissue, which saw the record released as the band originally intended, this 20th-anniversary edition of Lifeblood redresses the balance by expanding it with a raft of B-sides, demos, remixes and a selection of live tracks. The glistening All Alone Here and the introspective Litany are welcome additions, as is Steven Wilson’s beat-heavy, reverbdrenched remix of 1985. And (Bowie producer) Tony Visconti’s original mixes of the three tracks that made it onto the final record – Solitude Sometimes Is, Emily and Cardiff Afterlife – are also intriguing to hear in their earliest form.
As expanded reissues go, there’s plenty on this one to savour and ultimately elevate a record that, 20 years on, still has a worthy place in the Manic Street Preachers eclectic history.