The first taster of the album arrived in May, when the band dropped ‘Orwellian’ – its catchy lead single with a storming melody and similar vibe to their Futurology era. 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.Rejoice – Welsh rockers, Manic Street Preachers have a new album out! Titled The Ultra Vivid Lament, the album’s the trios fourteenth and comes three years after the release of its predecessor, ‘Resistance Is Futile’. It acts like a gentle solo should, providing a moment of flurry before the final rush. 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.
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. Southall’s performance is great, but in the wrong place. 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.
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. 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. 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. 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. 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 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.īecause “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). 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. 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. So, yeah, about that gospel vocal solo – and yes it’s very appropriate to call a vocal performance a solo in this situation.
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