Afterending

The near future has been and gone

Well, here’s the political statement we all wanted to hear from the Manics after the – quite frankly – insane half-decade that the UK has had. But it’s not a rage against the institution, a nihilistic call to arms or a song fighting for a cause. It’s the final salute to the broken horizon as the ship slowly sinks underneath your feet.

The Ultra Vivid Lament isn’t really a COVID album but the weight of the pandemic did affect the album and its writers as well: the title of the record is Wire’s summary of the more intense lockdown periods and how the loneliness and anxiety of so many people became so tangible – vivid – when the world shut down. “Afterending” starts out as a description of the state the UK had found itself in the early 2020s. The European Union HQ in Brussels took down the UK flag as the split from the union was fully realised while civil liberties movements started to draw attention to less positive parts of UK’s history and initiated the removal (whether legal or illegal) of a number of statues dedicated to historic personnel who had risen to power through slave trade and colonial greed. As COVID restrictions became a reality, the daily news feeds were inundated with stories of conservative politicials breaking rules they had set without any repercussions, practically even flaunting their corruption with the dodgy PPE deals set by the government; the genuine im promptu, grassroots-organised act of people publically showing their gratitude to the National Health Service by clapping for them on their balconies and porches soon became taken over and co-opted as means of distraction by the same people who were actively trying to starve off NHS at the time of their biggest need. In just five lines Wire summarises everything going on around him and he doesn’t need to say anything else – the picture is vivid enough and it’s genuinely melancholy. After the first chorus the attention turns from the outside world to inside people’s homes, to the solitude that once felt like a resting place until it became enforced, and to the technology that once gave freedom but suddenly became the only means of communication – and doomscrolling.

Once upon a time this could have resulted in a fiery rant naming names and probably linking those names to dictators and despots from across history, but not in 2021. Everything is too much and given Wire’s open statements about his lack of belief in any major political powers anymore – i.e. most of this very album – he can’t see a way forward either. “Afterending” is a song of quiet and mournful acceptance – that there is no visible light at the end of the tunnel as “the near future has been and gone”. But you can at least find company in someone else during the end, and that’s comforting enough.

“Afterending” may as well be the title track – it is the ultra vivid lament of our times, and whether intentionally or not it brings the rest of the album together with nods to the previous songs. links in with the previous album. “Sail into the abyss with me” echoes the invite to walk together through the apocalypse in “Orwellian”, earlier on the band encouraged to not let the night divide us as we now “enter into a night of nothingness” – if you really want to stretch it then “painting portraits of our loneliness” could be wink towards the painter siblings of “The Secret He Had Missed” but it’s more realistically simply a phrase to describe the number of social media posts and memes elaborately describing the weird times people found themselves in. It brings the album to a rest not with a bang or even a sigh, but a kind of melancholy serenity. It puts in overt words what the rest of the album often only glances at, provides the context to everything that came before and thus appropriately closes the circle as the record ends. It’s the first time where a Manics album closer feels so overtly like a summary of what came before – even something like “Cardiff Afterlife”, which also tackled directly something the rest of the album was inspired by but avoided saying outright, didn’t feel like it quite closed the book as effectively in its themes as “Afterending” does.

Maybe the combination of that oddly calming acceptance and the summation of everything before it is what makes “Afterending” so powerful. My first listen of the album was through the headphones of the flat I lived back then, with my chair turned towards giant glass windows facing what used to be a busy motorway; and even as the worst lockdowns had ceased, that urban stretch was still like a ghost town compared to how it used to be. That scenery hit deep when “Afterending” played, and the song quickly established itself as a powerful moment that resonantly depicted where we were in a wider perspective, including mentally. The Manics themselves had been a powerful presence in my life for half my lifetime and while there had been peaks and valleys during those years, I had coincidentally found myself revisiting their works in the run up to the album and rekindled a familiar love with their body of work. “Afterending” and its tone, its deep sadness and almost defiant call for facing the non-existing future together, was – and still is – one of the very few times where I felt like this band who’d been such a lifeline for me were expressing themselves on the same wavelength I was going through on a personal, emotional level.

It’s just absolutely stunning, isn’t it? No grand solos, no bombastic gestures – even the sing-along towards the end feels like a gentle farewell with your established comrades in arms rather than anything that would invite a crowd together from scratch. But it’s gorgeously arranged, poignantly performed and is a downright perfect melody/lyric combo. It is everything the album has been working towards from an emotional perspective and puts it together with a musical language that’s a comfortable evolution of the band during their greatest introspective moments. And it’s personal, and beautifully so. An ultra vivid lament indeed.

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Happy Bored Alone

Boredom was always my best friеnd / ‘Cause boredom never really has to end

The mandatory late-album direct rock song, so much is clear from the piercing riff that James drives in almost from the very start. The demo has actually a little bit more of a groove to it and emphasises the rhythm section over the guitar, and with that choice the ABBA influence rises closer to the surface again: the dramatic dun-dundun piano stabs that punctuate every chorus line is a classic ABBA weapon and the defiant mannerism which James adopts in the chorus channels that same inspiration. The album version slightly streamlines the song further from the demo and gives more weight to the muscle behind it, and it’s to the song’s detriment because they’ve made them sound like the obligatory nod to the band’s more guitar-oriented history which have appeared throughout their albums since Send Away the Tigers regardless of what the album actually sounds like, and never is the right fit for them.

The choruses manage to crack that appearance slightly and it’s where “Happy Bored Alone” shines the most, particularly towards the end as James seemingly reinterprets one of Wire’s old verses as the final chorus and gives the song a sudden final lift-off. Wire has talked about how peace he finds within the solitude of his own uneventful world so much that it’s a Manics staple, but it’s never sounded as triumphant as it does in the final choruses here – the instruments rising, the pianos hammering their notes, James twisting Wire’s ode to boredom into as close to an uplifting anthem as he can. For a moment the song finds a spot where it begins to resemble something a little more poignant, but perhaps in the wider scheme of things it’s too little and too late. Many of the strengths of “Happy Bored Alone” are done better before on the very same album, and its unique flair – the traditionally somewhat more Manics-esque air of it – doesn’t actually serve it all that well. Much like this entry, the song has not got much to say and it ends up giving the album an incidental moment’s fumble as it begins to draw to its close.

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Blank Diary Entry

The emptiness tells its own story

“Blank Diary Entry” stands alone and stranded from the rest of the album, with a lot of detail that contributes to its overall somewhat aloof mood. Buried in the back end of the album, it’s a sudden move away from the general mindset of the album, and a curious side step at that.

For one, it’s the album’s most guitar-oriented song. James’ guitar mainly plays supporting role throughout the album and even when it appears more prominently, it’s never the kind of grand guitar wall experience that Manics used to be known for. Nor does that happen in this song either, and it’s instead a collage of James casting his net to a wide range of styles and bringing them together through interspersed layers. The textural background guitar of the verses, the jangly acoustic that acts as the propulsive push forward, the stylish licks of the chorus and the familiar melodic arpeggios, even the atmospheric solo – there’s a lot of guitar throughout “Blank Diary Entry” but every time it appears, it sounds completely different – like different players dipping in and out of the song’s sound world without wanting to dominate the proceedings. The album’s signature piano is accounted for as well, but for one of the few times on the album the guitar feels like the lead instrument, even if it never clicks as one until you pay attention just how much it takes up of the general soundspace in all its various guises.

And to be fair, this isn’t completely unexpected from the Manics, it just isn’t something we haven’t necessarily heard in a long, long while. “Blank Diary Entry” gives me major deja vus to the Manics b-sides from around their classic hit days, circa 1996 to 2002. It’s got the same kind of melancholy murkiness and a low-stakes grounded quirkiness that the band used to tuck away as their bonus tracks when the albums received all the more cohesively put together songs. The song’s long outro, which wanders around searching for the ending in a manner that feels almost improvised, drills that comparison down even further: it’s the type of musical trailing-off that has been largely absent as they’ve cleaned up their act and stuck to more tightly-built songs. This isn’t a backhanded compliment and certainly not a put-down, either: that was a fantastic period for Manics songs and it’s almost warming to hear that touch appear again in the most unexpected of places. And it works, too.

What I’m not sure works as much are the featured co-lead vocals from Mark Lanegan (and I feel oddly bad for saying so given this was one of his last appearances before his untimely death). I’m generally a fan of Lanegan’s crawling drawl: every single syllable that he utters sounds like it dug out from the depths of hell, casting an impeccably heavy mood over any song he featured in. While the song’s generally murkier outset is a natural reservation for Lanegan’s voice to wander in, it’s awkward bedfellows with James’ smooth delivery. The two men sound like they’re invading each other’s presence rather than collaborating on a song, and it makes the track disjointed – it never sounds like a genuine duet but rather an awkward remix where neither singer ever so much as discussed their parts before recording them.

And that leaves me a little more conflicted about this song than I want, because I think it’s one of the more hidden surprises of The Ultra Vivid Lament. For a long time the only thing I could take away from the track was the illfitting nature of the vocals, and it wasn’t until I purposefully started listening to the track out of context and began to pay attention to everything that isn’t the vocals that the vividly layered backdrop became visible. As it stands now it’s a curiously compelling song, a strange sidetract from the album’s typical drivenly melodic form – a slow burner that’s easy to underestimate but reveals its secrets to patient listeners.

(final aside – if it wasn’t for the album clearly crediting all songs to the Manics, I’d have wagered the first verse to be written by Lanegan. The language is so unlike Wire’s current form and feels close to how he’d try to match Richey during the darker days. Wouldn’t be surprised if it’s another passage where Wire has “taken inspiration” from someone else’s poem)

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Into the Waves of Love

Don’t try to sell me a universal truth

So, yeah, about that gospel vocal solo – and yes it’s very appropriate to call a vocal performance a solo in this situation.

It’s really hard not to mention “Into the Waves of Love” and then not instantly talk about the powerhouse vocal performance from Cat Southall that appears without warning or foreshadowing and then disappears just as abruptly, but which leaves a lasting impression. Many have noted the similarities in the tone of the vocals with Pink Floyd‘s “The Great Gig in the Sky”, another song similarly fuelled by the powerhouse guest vocals – though in this case, we only spend around 30 seconds in a three minute song with them. But that comparison only serves to highlight the dominance the vocals have on this song, and it honestly bites “Into the Waves of Love” a little.

Because “Into the Waves of Love” is a delicate song – I mean just look at that title, quite possibly the most blissfully twee thing Nicky Wire has ever written down (married to another lyric about his personal loss of direction, of course). When Manics are on this kind of easygoing, jubilantly freespirited mode my first thought is always to refer back to The Great Western, James’ first solo album which has in deep secrecy become the foundation of so much of more contemporary Manics over a decade after Bradfield so sheepishly released it – the flourishes of melodies, the lightfooted spring in its step and even the layered vocals all feel like part of that same DNA. But this has just as much common with actual Manics songs of the recent past which have tried run loose and with a full-hearted smile: think “I Think I Found It” or the most immediate moments of Resistance Is Futile. The difference here (and I say this as one of the few defenders of “I Think I Found It”) is that the way this mood is conveyed here makes it a much more natural fit to the world of the Manics. This is despite being another piano-guided song and James’ guitar largely remains as a textural element in the background – but on the album that seems them generally embrace the ivory keys, it fits into the wider continuum and as the album has shifted towards its latter half, a breeze of joy and uninhibited melodic prettiness isn’t too far fetched anymore.

So when that big boisterous guest vocal comes in, it’s just too heavy-handed for the gentle joie de vivre of the song it’s in. It’s a powerhouse climax moment in a song that’s just happy to run through the fields: too much bombast where it’s not necessarily needed. Southall’s performance is great, but in the wrong place. And if you want to back that argument up, you have the demo of the song available on the deluxe edition which is effectively just a less polished version of the final version, but with the key difference that the vocal breakdown isn’t there. In its place is a minimalistic guitar solo from James, processed so heavily that it could as well be a shimmering synth line – it’s still present in the final song too, quietly mixed under Southall, but the more prominent placement for it in the demo is also more befitting for the song it’s in. It acts like a gentle solo should, providing a moment of flurry before the final rush. With that little change, the demo is my preferred version – though it is to be said, even with the minor complaints I have this is still one of the highlights of the album’s second half.

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Complicated Illusions

In the rhythm of your voice I find space to rejoice

The deluxe edition of The Ultra Vivid Lament offers two demos for “Complicated Illusions”. The first one is a short Nicky Wire home recording, featuring Wire going through the extended chorus – the gentle strum and the vocal melody are pitch perfectly in the realm of I Killed the Zeitgeist which nearly two decades from its release continues to stand as the perfect definition of Wire’s independent voice in songwriting. By the time the song had been given to James to flesh out – per the second demo where Bradfield goes through the entire song with an acoustic guitar accompaniment – the strum has received a jubilant rhythm and the vocal melody has been uplifted and now has a wholly different melodic step to it despite following the same rough guidelines. It’s a really interesting comparison shot between how two songwriters treat the same snippet.

James’ version of course made it to the album in the end, with a fully configured arrangement in line with the rest of the album (lots of pianos, twinkling keyboards, etc). James’ demo also featured a vocal double track in the chorus which gave it an almost gospel-like twang, and that has flowed into the final version. “Complicated Illusions” isn’t a song of praise but it has the feel of spiritual enlightment which James channels through the uplifting, rising choruses – think “Let Robeson Sing” once more, just a little less obvious in its inspiration. The word that keeps coming to my head is “pure”, like a clean beam of light glimmering above the song – which may not make sense to anyone but me, but that’s the mental image that pops through. It’s pristine and shimmering, and the ever so slightly reminiscence to the aesthetics of Lifeblood in its production may be the reason behind it.

“Complicated Illusions” is blissfully (and ironically) uncomplicated, letting its aching melodies shine without any unnecessary excess or edge. It’s a sincere pop anthem in the vein of the previous album’s “Hold Me Like a Heaven”: straight to the point but basking its in its beauty and creating something genuinely uplifting out of it. It’s a beautiful anthem so direct that you automatically put your guard up first, but the rise of the chorus cracks the mightiest of armours – the sincerity and earnestness of the Manics giving into this melodic lushness is irresistable. There’s a tinge of wistfulness to it – there always is with this band – as Wire breaks down his loss of faith in the old truths he used to believe and now seem nothing but elaborate lies i.e. complicated illusions, and describes it with a mournfully delicate touch. But James’ arrangement is like finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel and realising that not everything is lost.

The band more or less gave up on the album’s promo campaign after they managed to land the #1 spot – mission complete I guess? – and “Complicated Illusions” was released as the third and final promo single so quietly that I had completely forgotten about it until now. There was no single cover or a music video, though a lyric video directed and illustrated by Kieran Evans was released. The designation of the song was a promotional single felt like a token move with no real effort behind it, but if that turns out to be the reason why this might one day end up in some form of Complete Singles type collection, then good. It’s the sudden beautiful gem of the album that may not be the flashiest compared to some of the immediate highlights, but suddenly becomes the song that I’ve found myself maybe repeating the most on its own, outside the context of the album.

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Diapause

I’ve burnt so many bridges, but not the one that leads to you

It’s the slot for the traditional Manics mid-album stadium torchlight ballad, but this time it’s drenched in atmosphere. You could imagine that in a different life “Diapause” would break through with a bellowing, heartfelt chorus but here it’s diving somewhere between waking and sleeping – gently tugged along by the album’s signature piano, the layers of production and Sean’s suave drumming that becomes the song’s unexpected lead, perhaps thanks to the swifts flicks between tempos and styles throughout. “Diapause” is lost in its haunting mists, quietly longing for a way out: but when the surface cracks open and the light comes through in the chorus, it never expands into the giant you’d expect. It always shows restraint.

It’s why “Diapause” is one of those songs where the initial listens made you feel like you were missing something, and the later listens are a revelation. It’s been a while since the Manics have committed to a slowburner so intensely and it’s what ultimately sets the song apart: its melancholy is like a comfortable caress, a familiar entity to embrace. While ultimately its bright spots do overtake it – culminating in a lush two-part instrumental section where James’ careful solo gives way for glistening keyboards – its those moody verses and breakdowns that truly make “Diapause” a stand-out that always felt like the heart and core of the record, even if it didn’t quite click as one the first few times around.

Of course, equal parts of the glory go to Wire here who’s in absolutely beautiful form. I’ve referenced or quipped about Wire’s habits and favourite subjects when it comes to depicting the inner sanctum of his mind on paper – it’s what happens naturally when you literally write about every single Manics songs within a year and get a little too familiar with it all – but I’ve always been a staunch defender of Wire as a lyricist especially when it comes to his more introspective material: he has come up with some genuinely powerful and resonating ways of channelling his inner demons over the years and it’s partly why many of the more inwards Manics album have turned out to be particular favourites of mine. “Diapause” is one of those highlights, showing a type of vulnerability Wire rarely admits to: needing someone else instead of fighting alone all the time. The highlighted lyric at the top of this post became an instant favourite and part of its power is in how 99% of the time Wire would rather shut himself into solitude than connect. Diapause as a term means suspended development in biology, e.g. insects slowing their lifesigns to a minimum and effectively pressing pause in their lives during harsh environmental conditions, resuming once the world is capable of living in again; it’s also one of the rare Manics lyrics where the title is never spoken, probably for the better.

To sort of further highlight the seemingly integral nature this song has with the album, the intro was one of the very first things we heard from it as it appeared in the initial teasers, cutting just after the “is this just the beginning”. It made for a very strong teaser – once again showcasing how the band’s album trailers have become genuinely exciting affairs, more than their music videos.

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Don’t Let the Night Divide Us

Don’t let those boys from Eton suggest that we are beaten

Monkey’s paw effect in practice, here. For a band once famous for their politics, the Manics have been remarkably quiet about the current state of the British government even though the Tory reign of the 2010s and onwards has given plenty of material that the early 1990s version of the band would have lapped up. Instead, Wire’s writing has largely focused on internal themes and any political notions have been either historical, centered around Wire himself and his loss of faith in all political parties, or so vague they barely count (is the overt Euro-adoration of Futurology a response to the anti-EU settlement that was being peddled around the time? Answers on a postcard). “Don’t Let the Night Divide Us” is the first truly direct jab directed at contemporary politics in a long, long time – and of course, it’s the most toothless thing he’s ever written around the subject. While ostensibly serving as a rallying call-to-arms against the Tories (the “boys from Eton” being a reference to the boarding school in Eton which effectively serves as a political elite networking event disguised as education), the generic finger-waving tone of the song is so anonymous, so full of anemic “we are on the side of l i g h t” fridge magnet sloganeering that any bite – or any actual stance at all – has been washed away with. The second verse (“Reject all propaganda…”) could have come from a Muse song, so formless and ultimately devoid of any actual content it is despite its superficial us vs them mentality.

Probably some of this slight frustration is tied down to the fact that “Don’t Let the Night Divide Us” is plain and simple the flimsiest thing that made it on the record. The ABBA inspirations are in full swing again, but this time it’s the fluffy twee bubblegum songs that most people forget ABBA made their name with before they took a more dramatic angle. The album’s characteristic piano is out in full force again and serves as the song’s primary positive point, gliding through the run-of-the-mill verses and choruses that sound like a leftover from Resistance Is Futile; it’s interesting to note that based on the deluxe edition’s demos this started out as a brief Wire sketch, before James presumably got tasked to finish it and in his at-the-time piano-oriented mood simply let the keys lead Wire’s draft melodies. But the arrangement can’t really save what isn’t a particularly exciting song in its core and so whilst on paper the juxtaposition of a bright pop song with politically charged lyrics is a classic combination, between the toothless lyrics and the flimsy music neither part really succeeds and you’re left with a stark drop in quality after the album got to such a great start.

The overall feeling left is that of a song that feels like one written out of obligation or expectation: that the fans were expecting the band’s political streak to return, but trying to write something like it when they’re now wisened old men rather than brash young punks just doesn’t come as naturally anymore. Thus, you’re left with a song that presumably started with the “boys from Eton” rhyme (which Wire must have felt especially proud of given it was plastered all over the tour merch) and was pushed to finish from there. It’s not like the band don’t know how to be political anymore either – “Afterending” on this very album pulls off that angle incredibly well. Trying to carve a feel-good anthem preaching to the choir out of the chosen subject matter on the other hand may have had good intentions, but ultimately comes off hollow.

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Quest for Ancient Colour

I used to control but now I just feel used

The beginning of “Quest for Ancient Colour” is a gentle shock. There’s many Manics songs that feature a piano, sometimes even in a practical lead role, but it’s always been in tandem with the band’s usual instruments. Hearing James accompanied only by a piano is oddly startling in a way that leads you to realise just how abnormal that is. Despite a career spanning several decades with hundreds and hundreds of songs released, the Manics have never had an intimate piano piece like most artists stumble into at least once.

The piano was James’ COVID lockdown project. After having written songs all his lifetime with a guitar and having only ever dabbled in the basics of a piano set, he spent the sudden abundance of free time during the pandemic heydays getting more comfortable with the instrument. A chunk of both his second solo album Even in Exile and the majority of The Ultra Vivid Lament were written on the piano, and “Quest for Ancient Colour” retains those roots most vividly. While the rest of the band does eventually appear and some stylish guitar licks begin to worm their way in – paving the way for a classically Bradfieldian guitar solo – “Quest for Ancient Colour” never drops the emphasis it has for the piano. It’s a simple change in the greater scheme of things, but does have an effect on the song’s overall writing and feel – it’s more graceful and more fluid than Manics usually are, its melodies gently gliding across the surface.

In fact, I sort of think it would work best with a full focus on just what James is doing. The demo for the song found on the deluxe edition of the album is just James and the piano and it’s really beautiful – well worthy of being called a fully fledged alternative version rather than just a rudimentary sketch as one would assume a demo is. It lends the song an additional aura of vulnerability and really emphasises the gentle emotion of it all. It also works superbly with the lyrics, Wire once again looking inwards through a self-deprecating lens, seemingly commenting about a moment’s loss of inspiration – “my scream had lost its source”. Whilst the album version is very good and the guitar solo specifically really lifts the song beautifully, overall the full piano demo might just be my preferred take: maybe it’s the novelty of just James and piano, but its nakedness carries a surprising strength.

As an aside, in respect of the cryptic title which I’m probably not the only person wondering about – it may be taken from a 2018 documentary of the same name which focused on a modern day artist re-discovering how historic Japanese artists created and used colour in their art. I don’t believe Wire has ever confirmed this but given his love for Japan, art and taking titles off works he loves, it’s plausible.

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The Secret He Had Missed

I’ll be remembered as your brother

On the introspective The Ultra Vivid Lament, “The Secret He Had Missed” is a little out of place – it’s the sole song on the album that’s very specifically about someone else, in one of Wire’s classic biography exercises. Augustus and Gwen John were two siblings from Wales from ca. late 1800s, both painters but living opposite lives: Augustus immersed himself in the celebrity artist lifestyle and found fame during his lifetime, while Gwen lived an ascetic life in France and became more celebrated after her passing (among her paintings is a set called “The Convalescent”, where Wire likely took the title from for the Know Your Enemy cut). The song is primarily from the point of view of Augustus (with a hint of an omnipresent narrator) and suggests that while he had the glory in his lifetime, he ultimately stood in the shadow of his sister and was painfully aware of it. For a biography lyric it’s got more layers than the usual lifetime story and shows how even in his later years Wire’s style keeps evolving, finding more nuance when depicting the people whose art he admires.

From the musical angle, “The Secret He Had Missed” takes the sonical motto of the album and weaponises it. It’s the single of the record: the song that had never any option but to be the big promotional cut because it’s effectively a barrage of hooks all ready to hit the part of your brain that makes your foot tap in rhythm without even thinking it. It makes it both slightly stick out, but also ramps up the album’s intensity and pushes it for the ride down the hill after it’s properly gotten going. Wire described it as the most Abba-indebted song of the sessions and between the glacial pianos, the groove-laden bass and the vocal back-and-forth, the influence is clear. It’s all ran through the Manics filter so that it comfortably slots in their overall ouevre, and that assassin-like melodic hook approach makes great bedfellows with the band’s dynamics. The best word to describe it really is “sharp”: every single twist, turn and melodic rise it takes it comes across almost tactical, like Bradfield attempting to engineer the most impossible to resist pop song he could come up with. He almost gets there – but even the attempt is so exciting it can’t help but be one of the album’s highlights.

Speaking of the vocals, “The Secret He Had Missed” brings back the guest vocals and James gets to duet with Julia Cummings from Sunflower Bean – a band which Wire has relentlessly kept mentioning it in the couple of years in the rundown to the album and whose 2018 album Twentytwo in Blue has been described by him as one of his all-time favourites; another case of the band taking advantage of their modern propensity for duets to ask their favourite artists to work with them. Cummings is a great addition – she gets the ABBA comparisons and answers them with that same commanding yet mysterious ice-cool approach that Agnetha and Anni-Frid mastered. Her snaps and follow-ups to James are perfectly in sync and really do make the song sound like a conversation between the two siblings, even when it isn’t – and you wish it was, just because of how well Bradfield and her pull the dynamic off. The vocal chemistry is the cherry on top of the song and turns it into one of the Manics’ finest duets.

When it became the album’s second (and last) single, it received much more of a push than “Orwellian” did – including multiple TV appearances and a music video with some actual effort put into it. Another Kieran Evans job, it cuts between shots of the band playing in what looks like an empty hall (the mirror ball that appears at one point to highlight the disco influence is so sad it flips right back to wonderful) and the actress Aimee-Ffion Edwards walking along the beaches of Tenby (the Johns’ home city), miming to Cummings’ vocals. From a fan perspective the most exciting thing about the campaign was the gift download of a “piano acoustic version” of the song. It’s a lot more elaborate than the name gives away: there’s an ominous drum machine backing the titular piano and the song itself has been slowed down (now running to just short of five minutes) and has had its melodies slightly altered to the extent that it stands out as a legitimate alternative version rather than a quick acoustic version, and it’s a very compelling take on the track. The guest vocals on this version are handled by Cat Southall, who accompanied the Manics during the tour and the various televised performances of the song – which makes this recording a nice way to give her contribution to the song a more “official”, lasting presence.

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Orwellian

A deepening sense of fear and crime

“Orwellian” as a term derives from George Orwell’s 1984 and commonly has been used by those who politically lean on the left to reference the totalitarianist government of the book when real life political bodies have began to take measures to resemble the overtly controlling and authoritarian dystopia in the story. Like all terms used by the left, the more conservative bodies eventually began to co-opt it to refer to perceived “nanny states” and their own persecution complex when it came to their “freedom of speech”, and that seems to be the more common usage of the term in current political discourse. The result of this back and forth is that “orwellian” has not only become an overused cliché term, but a loaded one that is going to court controversy or bad faith debates when evoked.

All of which makes it a really awkward term for the Manics to use when speaking about their own confusion and distrust in modern day politics. As a political band the Manics had thrived when they had a clear bad guy to rage against, but with the core political parties in the UK starting to muddy the waters between political lines, it lead the band and particularly Wire to spiral into a state of political apathy as the left currently struggling for power is no longer the left that he once knew – a subject he’s already touched upon a few times across the past couple of albums. “Orwellian”, the song, is very sharply about that confusion of not knowing who to trust anymore when both sides obfuscate the truth and wage culture wars that feel completely detached from anything relevant, and I don’t think the use of the titular term is in any way a comment on the band’s current political stance (some internet commenters have referred to this as a “centrist anthem” and as as e-savvy of a catchphrase it is, I don’t think it’s quite correct). What’s more likely is that Wire, in his own bubble, is likely completely unaware of the nuances and without all the explanatory context, the lyric reads really awkwardly given the very aggressive state of modern political discussion and the band’s own past in that regard. Despite its subject matter I’m not sure it’s a lyric that really should be read into too deeply – especially with the chorus culminating in the nearly romantic notion of “I’ll walk you through the apocalypse / where you and me could co-exist”, which is so far removed from the rest of the lyric that it reveals how surface-level the rest of its snappy one-liners should be taken as.

Snappy lyrics for a snappy song. “Orwellian” is a classic Manics single full of Bradfield’s iconic melodies, a sing-along anthem of a chorus and soaring soundscapes. The twist this time is the “The Clash plays Abba” mood that Wire used to describe the album, most apparent in the crystalline piano stabs that punctuate the bridge. “Orwellian” was one of the first songs written for the album and even back when there was still no clear plan for the record, the band were mentioning it in interviews as the likely point of reference to go forward with and in terms of its execution it’s the most obvious example on the album about the sound they started to quote for the album once it was ready for release. Those ABBA nods had coincidentally started to become a fairly popular reference point all across popular music around the same time and so the approach isn’t particularly novel in the grand scheme of things, but in the Manics’ own realm there’s something thoroughly exciting in those glacial pianos accentuating the song. If the lyrics are a potential pothole you could end up getting lost in while discussing the nuances behind it all, the music in contrast barely warrants a deeper analysis because it’s simply so strikingly efficient. It’s the Manics pulling off another traditional lead single off their sleeves, with all the exciting immediacy and melodic rush that accompanies those songs at their best.

Typical for a late-period single, the usual accompaniments that go together with such promotional efforts are largely devoid of that very effort. The video was directed by the band’s contemporary court director Kieran Evans who preferred to call it it a “visual accompaniment” rather than a music video, combining a number of archival footage of vast sceneries Evans had shot around the world with a few clips of the band standing around in the middle of nowhere, looking pensive; an edited version accompanied the original album teaser and did a pretty efficient job in stoking the excitement with the cryptic shots of a diamond shape panel reflecting lights in abandoned areas, but the full video is the kind of an afternoon job that barely remarks a comment. The only physical version of the single was a 7″ bound together with select pre-orders of the album, came with no sleeve quote and was flipsided by Gwenno‘s remix of the song. Gwenno, an avowed Manics fan, has opted to be a traditionalist with her remix and turned the song into a largely original and repetetive instrumental composition with select soundbites of James’ original vocals thrown in and looped for good measure – it reminds me of many of their golden period remixes, but specifically the ones that you don’t put in your DIY remix compilation.

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