Music

Most will have made up their minds here nine seconds into second song ‘Underdogs’, when a firey James Dean Bradfield growls, ‘This one’s for the freaks!’ over the sort of Guns N’Roses-style riffage that was outlawed from decent society in about 1994. Still, the Manics raison d’etre was always delighting and pissing people off in equal measure, and here, much more so than on any of the other, far more dignified post-Richey albums, there’s more than enough intelligence/stupidity (see: ‘Imperial Bodybags’), massive choruses/pompousness (‘The Second Great Depression’) and poignant gestures/sacrilegious twaddle (a hidden cover of Lennon’s ‘Working Class Hero’, mere mention of which was  enough to make two Time Out staffers scream, ‘Fucking wankers!’) to reignite the fires in devotees and detesters. It may not quite be the record on which they’ve fully rediscovered what Nicky Wire terms ‘the element of fabulous disaster’, but one thing is certain of this eighth studio effort: in its aftermath, everyone will be voicing their opinion on the Manics, just like the old days. And that was always the point.