#2 on the Amazon music chart in the week of release. 
You could argue that the more-of-everything approach overeggs the pudding a bit: occasionally, the density of the sound can leave the listener feeling a little crowded out, not least on Some Kind of Nothingness, which features a guest vocal from Ian McCulloch, who fights for space not only with the Manics in epic-and-sweeping mode, but an orchestra, a gospel choir, the Fife Constabulary Pipe Band, the Royal Drummers of Burundi and so on.
But you could argue that's what you're likely to get from a band once answered the trivial what's-your-favourite-dinner? questions in the NME's Material World with a series of carefully annotated quotations from Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, Heidegger and Mao Zedong, and, as Wire once ruefully noted, spent "300 grand putting on a gig for Fidel Castro, a communist system we don't really believe in". Complaining that they occasionally overegg the pudding seems a bit like complaining that the Swedish House Mafia hail from Sweden and persist in making house music.
This is what the Manic Street Preachers do. As it plays, you're struck by the fact that no one else does anything like it: reason enough for the Manic Street Preachers' continued existence.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010...ostcards-young
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Postcards-Yo...5260729&sr=1-1
You could argue that the more-of-everything approach overeggs the pudding a bit: occasionally, the density of the sound can leave the listener feeling a little crowded out, not least on Some Kind of Nothingness, which features a guest vocal from Ian McCulloch, who fights for space not only with the Manics in epic-and-sweeping mode, but an orchestra, a gospel choir, the Fife Constabulary Pipe Band, the Royal Drummers of Burundi and so on.
But you could argue that's what you're likely to get from a band once answered the trivial what's-your-favourite-dinner? questions in the NME's Material World with a series of carefully annotated quotations from Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, Heidegger and Mao Zedong, and, as Wire once ruefully noted, spent "300 grand putting on a gig for Fidel Castro, a communist system we don't really believe in". Complaining that they occasionally overegg the pudding seems a bit like complaining that the Swedish House Mafia hail from Sweden and persist in making house music.
This is what the Manic Street Preachers do. As it plays, you're struck by the fact that no one else does anything like it: reason enough for the Manic Street Preachers' continued existence.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010...ostcards-young
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Postcards-Yo...5260729&sr=1-1
