Skip to main content

A Design For Life

They haven't toured America in a decade, and the show was 1/3 full at best. But leave it to Manic Street Preachers to give the Majestic Theater a full stadium energy in a small club, rocking the pubes off of the Detroit faithful.

Their new album Journal For Plague Lovers is the first to feature lyrics from their presumed dead bandmate Richey Edwards (who vanished near a notorious suicide spot in 1996) culled from his notebooks. Produced with austere power by Steve Albini, Journal For Plague Lovers continues their late-career resurgence first sparked on Send Away The Tigers from '07, with a renewed rock vim and vigor that had all but vanished from their recorded output for years prior. In other words, if you want rock and roll, you got it. Here's the set list from the recent Detroit show:

  1. Motorcycle Emptiness
  2. No Surface All Feeling
  3. Peeled Apples
  4. Your Love Alone
  5. La Tristessa Durera
  6. Jackie Collins Existential Question Time
  7. Let Robeson Sing
  8. Faster
  9. Enola/Alone
  10. Marlon J.D.
  11. From Despair To Where
  12. Tolerate
  13. This Is Yesterday (Acoustic)
  14. Small Black Flowers (Acoustic)
  15. Send Away The Tigers
  16. You Stole The Sun From My Heart
  17. Motown Junk
  18. Me And Stephen Hawking
  19. Little Baby Nothing
  20. You Love Us
  21. A Design For Life
It was a tremendous time, seeing a band that plays to tens of thousands in Europe rock the hundred or so Michigan folk. If you haven't already checked the band out, by all means begin at the beginning, when their sound was a collision between Guns 'N' Roses, Nirvana, and EMF. (Really.) It only gets better from there.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"The Silver Gun" by Robert Palmer (1983)

I mean...Urdu? Seriously, Urdu . On an already eclectic and worldly album -- Pride , from 1983 -- "The Silver Gun" closes a chapter in Robert Palmer's career by singing a song about a horse in a language spoken daily by over 100 million people. The liquid bass line and propulsive electronics set out a bedrock for Palmer to ping phrasings rather out of place in Western music, askew astride even the peripatetic minimalism of the rest of the record. Somehow, in the middle of Michigan's Appalachia, I had this on vinyl a few years before the CD era officially commenced. It was an album of effort -- even the cover, a pointillism-and-bronze work, had Palmer's head barely above the water -- but the stitches didn't show to my pre-adolescent eyes and ears. In a career marked by zigs and zags, Pride and "The Silver Gun" were most certainly Other, and for a kid that felt like he didn't belong much of anywhere, it was nice to have those discrete feeling...
Post a Comment
Read more

Some 2024 Listening Pleasures

It started with a gift of two JBL Control 25 speakers, and by "gift" I mean "borrowed" -- a.k.a. "will never return" -- from an obsolete tech detritus pile at work. I may have snagged more than two gifts, of course, but the raw footage proving such a claim remains elusive. And after installing the JBL speakers into the upper corners of the music room, and after installing speaker stands for the rear speakers I already had, and after making the hard choice between a big-ass bean bag and a comfy leather recliner to properly center myself in the audio field (R.I.P., big-ass bean bag), there was only one missing piece: the Apple TV 4K unit. So for me, 2024 was the year I streamed a lot of music in Atmos through Apple Music, surrounded by new tunes and old bops in thrilling new dimensions. Some might say you don't need surround sound, 'cos the two ears + two speakers modality has been dandy for a while now, but that's like saying you don't need ...
Post a Comment
Read more

NBC -- Never Believe Contracts

Whatever side you're falling on in the recent NBC late-night "deck chairs on the Titanic " shuffle, you have to admit it's been good comedy for all parties involved. While Letterman and Craig Ferguson have been sharp (especially Letterman, who has been gleeful in his "I told you so" vitriol), the best bits have come from Leno and O'Brien. Evidence: It's hard to follow all the angles here, but two things are clear: NBC violated Leno's contract (guaranteeing the 10pm slot), and NBC didn't violate O'Brien's contract (which made no time slot guarantees). So it's not hard to see who the loser here will be. O'Brien won't get the show he wants, Leno will step into a hollow echo of his past success, and tens of millions of dollars will be up in the air. Only Jimmy Fallon will continue to gestate his talent relatively unmolested, and his security is merely a function of the low expectations of his time slot. Meanwhile, CBS (a...
Post a Comment
Read more