All Apologies, All Eulogies

So I haven't posted in what, forever. November was not my month. Internet went down. Too cynical and writers' block. Life got in the way. I apologise unreservedly. It shall not happen again this crisp December. Think of it as an early resolution.

Richey Edwards was declared legally dead last week. From a concerned poster on my social networking wall: "I heard about the ruling on Richie, but do try not to act morose and distant. Don't let grief get in the way of being your normal cheerful self." (I believe the word is irony). I'd like to satisfy all wellwishers as to my mental state. I am not down (any more than usual). Life goes on. Although perhaps with more abstract and terse prose.

Okay, that's enough of that. I can't keep writing a post in this style, it's driving me insane. I read a lot of Don DeLillo this week, and it's hit my clauses hardest. Microsoft Word would have a field day - "Fragment- consider revising". That's irony too, isn't it? Is Bill Gates laughably hypocritical when it comes to sentence structure or what? Fragment. Consider. Revising. Where's the grammar in that? Practice what you preach, you unapologetic Creosote cretin. And make your operating system less infuriating while you're at it. And kill that fucking paperclip.

Anyway, Richey. Yes, this news is sad to me, as it will be to all true followers of the Bible (not that papery, leatherbound thing, the real Bible). That the obituary I linked to above was the most read article on the Guardian website for the day it was published indicates some of the level of devotion the man inspired. The thing is, this news doesn't really change anything for me or the legions of acolytes like me. We know Richey is gone, we've had 14 years to accept the fact. But he still lives. No, not on some Goan beach or secluded monastery, but in his words. I know this is corny (how else can one write a eulogy?), but his fierce genius still breathes through those machinegun bursts of lyrical insight that litter the Manics' early songs. I wish you peace, Richey, wherever you may be. A morality obedient only to the cleansed repented. You were stronger than Mensa, Miller and Mailer. You spat out Plath and Pinter. And you did not burn out, you will never fade away.

Album Review: 'The Holy Bible'

Last week, I posted my introduction to this new album review section. I waxed lyrical (a rather neat choice of cliche there, as you'll soon see) about how, for me, great music is more than just nice words and pretty tunes. It's atmospherics and intricacies, the ultimate dedication to all-consuming mood. I'm now going to be rather irritating, and plunge straight into a review of an album that is truly great, for precisely none of those reasons.

Hey, wait. Come back. Let me explain. Manic Street Preachers' The Holy Bible is my favourite album. It's been my favourite album pretty much since I first discovered it, three or four years ago, and immersed myself in its lyric booklet. Here was the spirit of Ginsberg, Camus and Plath, distilled into a near perfect hour-long outpouring of intelligent, literate rage. It's the voice of my hero, Richey Edwards.

Richey couldn't play his guitar. He didn't sing. He was an alcoholic, self-harming anorexic. But there was a fiery, poetic intelligence that burned within him, and lyrically, there is no other rockstar that even comes close to the attention to detail, the wealth of information in his songs. Nowhere was that talent so totally addressed as this, his legacy, his statement of intent. It's almost ludicrous, the quality and consistency of the words that make up this dark, intense beast. Songs about the extremes of human existence, about anorexia, prostitution, genocide, delivered with such a perverse, searing beauty that it's impossible to tear yourself away.

Take the couplet from 'Yes' that I quoted back in my very first entry on this blog, a paean to the prostitution of the self in one's art; "In these plagued streets of pity you can buy anything/for $200, anyone can conceive a god on video". Or the devastating introspection audible on the autographical 'Faster'; "I am idiot drug hive/The virgin tattered and the torn/Life is for the cold made warm and they are just lizards/Self disgust is self obsession honey and I do as I please/A morality obedient only to the cleansed repented". These aren't just words to mouth along to, they're complete works of art.

I'm not being completely facetious here, building up some manifesto one week only to tear it down the next. I do reserve the right to contradict myself (as Nicky Wire once said of his occasionally hypocritical TV interview rants), but there is musical genius at work here, too. At every turn, the ugly beauty of Edwards' vision is mirrored by some terrific (in both senses of the word) production. Take the doom-laden bass that crawls under your skin at the start of 'Archives of Pain', for instance, brooding and growling, gradually joined by keening feedback, before unwrapping itself into a scratched, battered and bruised guitar riff. You wouldn't think it possible for a guitar to sound like revenge, bloodlust and capital punishment, but somehow the way it writhes, contorts, it captures the fury of those lyrics.

Samples are scattered throughout these thirteen tracks, disembodied, disenfranchised voices, pulled from myriad sources, yet somehow bound to each other. A salespitching pimp. The anguished mother of a murder victim. A weary, ageing actor. At the midpoint, a snippet of taped interview with the author J.G. Ballard surfaces through the claustrophobic din, Richey's mantra. "I wanted to rub the human face in its own vomit, and then force it to look in the mirror." Ballard was talking about his novel, Crash, but he cuts to the core of what The Holy Bible is about.

The monolithic, six-minute penultimate song 'The Intense Humming of Evil', hyperbolic though it may sound, condenses all of these elements in a burst of controlled post-punk atmosphere that really does justify that title. Opening with a bed of industrial white noise, the sounds of a death-machinery, it builds unbearable suspense with a minute-long sample of a reporter at the Nuremberg trials; "From the ditch at Kerch, the dead will rise, bringing with them the acrid smoke and the deathly odour of scorched and martyred Europe. And the children, they too will come, stern and merciless. The butchers had no pity on them." Just as the crescendo becomes almost unbearable, it is interrupted by the snap and echo of reverberating snare, the beat itself becoming malevolent and machine-like. The guitars somehow manage the trick of seeming to constantly ascend, up and up, cranking the pressure further and further as Richey's words document with dignified respect the horror of the holocaust; "In block 5 we worship malaria/Lagerstrasse, poplar trees/Beauty lost, dignity gone/Rascher surveys us butcher bacteria". And the dread bass returns once more, still climbing further and further up, slowing and slowing, until finally it echoes quiet and all that remains is the shrill howl of the wind through Birkenau, where the birds no longer sing.

The Holy Bible proved to be Richey's epitaph. Just a few months after its release he vanished, never to be seen again. It is not known whether he is alive or dead, if he committed suicide or went into hiding, but this record remains, a document of his brilliance. It's an unflinching, confrontational, disturbing experience, and it's everything that great art should be. No compromises.

Next week, I'm going to the opposite end of the spectrum, to an album that delivers just as much intensity, almost without the use of any words at all. It's going to be the epitome of shoegaze, My Bloody Valentine's Loveless. See you there.

You got the money, I got the soul

When I set up this blog, I had a series of sort of vague ideas of what I was going to do with it. One of those sort of vague ideas was that I might occasionally turn my hand to music criticism, mainly just because it's a field of writing that's always interested me. Like just about every other music geek, I delude myself that my taste in music is better than everybody else's, act like a terrible snob when I find out that someone enjoys something that I consider unworthy, and more or less live in a perpetual state of fury that the whole world does not understand the music that I love. When I first read High Fidelity by Nick Hornby, I got tremendously excited, because I recognised so much of myself in those characters, who lived and breathed music with an all-consuming passion that far outstripped their ability to sustain functional relationships, even interractions, with other human beings. "That's me," I thought to myself,"I mean, with a much inferior taste in music though, obviously."

I have a tremendously unhealthy relationship with music. One of the first questions I have to get out of the way, before I can objectively judge whether I'm attracted to a woman or not, is "what do you think of Radiohead?". A negative response to that question is a bigger turn-off than syphillis, in my eyes. Start talking about the programming on Kid A, though, and I'll be making wedding plans within the hour. I swoon at girls who know their way around a microkorg or a protools unit. I know that this is disturbing. I can't help it. It's the way my mind is wired. I struggle to even have a proper conversation with someone until I've established that we at least like a couple of the same albums.

I don't really know where this obsession comes from. Both my parents have a fairly uninspiring attitude to music; they like some of it, they don't like most of it. My Dad will often say things like "you can't have a good song unless it's got a catchy tune", and other like statements which make me cringe with despair.

I first picked up the guitar when I was about thirteen. Now I play whenever I have a spare moment. Sometimes I write songs. Sometimes I play in a band. But I've always thought of myself first and foremost as a music fan above a musician. It's a troubling dialectic between words and music that goes on in my head. No matter how much of a feel I have for good writing, I can't shake the voice that says: Music is real. Rhythm and melody, they exist only as themselves. Art and literature are only refractions, shadows cast by music on the cave wall of reflection.

I've had an idea for a book that I've been toying with for a while, in which the lead characters' development is charted by a series of pieces of music criticism, the subject of each one hinting at the path his narrative will take. Some of the music writing that appears in this blog may be used for that project eventually, but for the time being it's just to satisfy that primal need, to share that music which stirs so much in me with others, to force them to understand.

Maybe it would help if I tried to explain what it is that makes 'great' music for me. Not just 'good' music, there's altogether too much of that for me even to think of writing about. Most of the music I hear I can find something 'good' in, but that's beside the point. If music is just 'good' I don't really want to hear it. That's like saying food is 'edible' rather than 'delicious'. I know lots of 'good' albums which I can listen to every so often. Everyone just wants a Big Mac from time to time. But you couldn't really call it the point of eating.

Great music illicits a gut response. It is hardwired directly to your involuntary muscles, provocative and tantalising. What I said earlier, about being a music fan rather than a musician? I guess that's because any time I hear a piece of music that really grabs me by the throat and moves me, it's because I'm thinking wow, I could never have made that. I need music to do things that I don't expect. I hate that old phrase "a tune that feels like you've heard it a million times before". What does that prove? Why would I want to listen to that, if I know where it's going? I'm not saying songs like this aren't good. I'm saying that they aren't great.

Intrinsically connected to this need is the need for detail, craft, layer upon layer of painstaking production. If I'm listening to an album for the hundredth time, I still want to hear something new, every time. I can't stand bands that try to record their albums 'as live'. Of course there's an energy and a joy to live performance, of course I love to watch music being played skilfully right in front of me, surrounded by like-minded fans, but you're not playing live. You're recording an album for fuck's sake. A piece of art, a legacy. If you don't make every conceivable effort to make each individual note or beat a vital and valuable part of the enterprise as a whole, contributing to this vast mosaic of an experience, well then, you don't deserve to be making music.

So to my mind, those are the two most important principles of great music. There are plenty of other principles which are vastly important, if not essential, of course. Valuable, intelligent lyrics that contribute to the piece, rather than vapid, shallow words. There is obviously something to be said for musicianship, the ability to do with an instrument what others can't. But above and beyond all other considerations, it is the adherence to and the pursuit of the mood, the atmosphere, the form. And the form of great music must only be the album, a complete and self-sustaining body of work.

So, starting next week, I'm going to aim to do a weekly critique of each of my favourite albums, trying to explain just why I love them so damn much. This is going to be one of the few regular bits of writing you're going to get from me that will be entirely positive; in fact it will all but shimmer with love and passion and good vibes. That said, I must warn you now, I'm going to lead off with one of the darkest, most confrontational and abrasive albums of all time (but also, in my opinion, one of the greatest ever to be recorded), the most indelible lyrical masterpiece to spill from the pen of the beautiful yet tortured soul of Richard James Edwards, Manic Street Preachers' The Holy Bible. See you next week.