Nearly thirty years into their career, we find The Manics, here, as contradictory as ever.
They’ve always wanted to bring socialism to the rock arena masses and here, they damned well near succeed. Distant Colours is an operatic, pretentious, sky scraping, piercing scream of a song.
Like the very best of The Manics’ work, it’s all about feeling. Feeling angry for the state of the world and how it has come to be (and whose fault this is). Feeling hopeful about what we can do to rectify this situation and also feeling optimistic that there are those of us out there (The Manics included) who are prepared to stand up and challenge the status quo.
James Dean Bradfield sounds more alive than he has in years. Bradfield always does his best work when he has something to prove and he’s got lots to work with here. Wire and Moore give him a brutal and spiky background. Distant Colours comes off like an older, sadder and wiser Everything Must Go. It’s got that song’s anger, fire and sarcasm and it’s also got a heart and voice of experience that The Manics of 1996 could only have dreamt of having.