Manic Street Preachers - 'Send Away The Tigers' (Columbia) Released 07/05/07

The new Manic Street Preachers album is 38 minutes long (their shortest ever), uses the same provocative inverted typography as that featured on ‘The Holy Bible’ (their greatest album), and features as its core image a Valerie Phillips photograph that is the depiction of the polarity between good and evil, the sacred and the profane, as personified by two awkward female adolescents who actually look like fans themselves, circa-‘Generation Terrorists’. In short, even before a note is heard, ‘Send Away The Tigers’ has stamped its intent with a glittery, flamboyant fist.

Whereas many bands flit from genre to genre under the high-minded umbrella of “experimentation”, in the case of the Manic Street Preachers one suspects that their journey since 1998’s ‘This Is My Truth…’ (the first album written with no creative input from the still-missing/missed Richey Edwards) has been driven less by a bold sense of adventure and more a desperate, scrambling sense of identity: ‘Know Your Enemy’ was a sprawling, often self-conscious album whose best moments were the ones that sounded like old Motown records, while ‘Lifeblood’ retreated too far into its elegiac, synth-pop shell to have any lasting effect. But this record, the group’s eighth (!) seems to have taken its cue from the title of Nicky Wire’s solo album from last year; it’s an approach that has worked wonders.

Because the world of the Manic Street Preachers with ‘Send Away The Tigers’ (named after the, er, “liberation” of Baghdad Zoo in 2003) is one in which the zeitgeist lies twitching in the corner (or even better, it never existed in the first place). Here there are no Sheffield wonderkids, no Brazilian electro-sex marvels, no neon bibles. It’s a smart move for a band to whom the word ‘irrelevant’ now attaches itself like no other, and suggests that the Welsh trio have embraced their place in the current cultural landscape.

This freedom ironically makes them sound fresher and more sincere than they have in ages. Second track ‘Underdogs’ is a case in point. It reads like an archetypal Manics manifesto, but one where the expected rage is replaced by a sentimentalism explicitly aimed at the fans themselves. It’s a sweet touch, a recognition for those who have stuck by the group whatever; the sound of a band at ease with both themselves now and the myth that they helped create way back at the start of the 90s.