Album Review

Manic Street Preachers – Send Away the Tigers

• 21st May 2007

Okay so the business of the much denied Greatest Hits album has been done (and you thought Oasis were the only band who refused to concede!) The matter of the much vaunted solo albums is also out of the way, with Messrs Dean Bradfield and Wire having vented their individual spleens (with mixed results.)

Now it’s time to get back to real business. The Preachers new album makes you wonder if they’ve ever been away.

‘Send Away the Tigers’ in many respects sounds like a continuation of a theme: an extension of the direction the band were headed in on the criminally underrated ‘Know Your Enemy’.

The flagship single off the album is the curious call and answer motif of ‘Your Love Alone is Not Enough.’ I must admit when I first heard it on radio I had no idea it was a Preachers’ single, and remember thinking at the time – “god they’re copying the Preachers note for note!”

Just goes to show what I know!

On the topic of Nina Parssons from the Cardigans though:

While the track is a decent standard Preachers melody, I couldn’t help feeling this is mutual respect at the expense of the listener. It smacks of an in joke, a cynical Preachers Karaoke, open only to the band and their cohorts. They’re taking the piss out of themselves – consider the following….

NINA: “You stole the sun”
JAMES: “Straight from my heart, from my heart, from my heart”

If my paranoid musings are correct it’s a little arrogant.

But the token chart track aside though there are some truly meaty offerings here, most notably the not-so-subtly-entitled Imperial Bodybags.

This indictment on the invasion of Iraq does well with a driving, sixties inspired guitar riff, that wouldn’t be out of place on a Vietnam movie soundtrack. I’d like to think this was deliberate.

This is Bradfield at his lyrically scathing best.

At 38 minutes ‘Send Away the Tigers’ isn’t the longest album you’ll hear this year, but it’s certainly the most important.
Listening to this album is like coming away from an evening with pissed workmates, bitching about hours, pay and conditions and while spending the whole evening orating their complaints, actually saying nothing. You go from the works do to a small familiar pub and bump into an old mate who speaks nothing but the truth and cynical reason.

It feels like the Preachers have never been away, as if we’ve somehow overlooked their presence on Soapbox Corner.

‘Send Away the Tigers’ by no means captures the pioneering spirit of ‘This is My Truth, Tell Me Yours’, but it’s a consistent taste of one of the greatest bands still working.

Open your eyes and your ears.

PS: If you thought their cover of Suicide is Painless kicks arse (and you’d be right) stick around for their cover of ‘Working Class Hero’ – worth the wait.