(art: Jenny Saville)

While their debut, Generation Terrorists, and its follow-up Gold Against The Soul garnered the Manic Street Preachers a lot of attention from the British press (and not always the good kind), the album that will forever be held up as their defining moment is 1994’s The Holy Bible.  Where its predecessors flirted with punk aesthetics and glam rock posing, the Holy Bible was an acerbic manifesto of intent, taut with friction and nervous energy.  At the album’s core, founding member Richey Edward’s lyrics documented pain, torture, love, lust, disgust, and disdain; it would be the only remaining document fans could turn to to try to make sense of what happened to Edwards when, in 1995, disappeared without a trace.

What we didn’t know is that a few weeks prior to disappearing, Edwards handed bassist Nicky Wire a stack of lyrics, basically turning over to his friend and band mate the last vestiges of his work for the band.  For 14 years, Wire, along with the guitarists and vocalist James Dean Bradfield and drummer Sean Moore, have held onto these lyrics, revisiting them occasionally, but never turning to them as source material for the band’s post-Richey albums.  After the success of their 2006 album Send Away The Tigers, the Manics decided that the time was right to go back to the lyrics and explore the possibility of using them for their next record.

The result is Journal for Plague Lovers, an album as dark, dirty and brooding as The Holy Bible, but not necessarily its sequel.  Time, experience, and distance have given the band perspective, so what’s documented on this Journal… is a trip back in time, a look at alternate futures.  “When you’re 40 it’s hard to feel that same level of rage and intensity,” says Wire about the making of the album, “but what’s important to remember is that we were working with lyrics written from a 27-/28-year-old’s point of view.  The lyrics liberated us to all those influences we had buried for a while, be it Pere Ubu, Magazine or Nirvana. All that kind of stuff came flooding out again.”  Journal for Plague Lovers won’t likely seduce fans of the epic-sounding Send Away The Tigers, but for those of us who cherish our copies of The Holy Bible, it’s a fond remembrance of another time, and a much appreciated visit with an old friend.

Journal for Plague Lovers is recorded by Steve Albini (!!) and will be out on Columbia Records May 18.

MP3: Manic Street Preachers “Yes” (from  The Holy Bible, 1994)
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