12 Overlooked Pieces of Awesome is an article series where each month Flint hopelessly rambles about an album in his collection that he dearly loves, even when they have their flaws. Each of the albums chosen tends to be usually overlooked, or forgotten, in one way or another and thus this article series aims to give an alternative view on said albums, or simply just bring something a bit less known to the spotlight.

Manic Street Preachers – Know Your Enemy (2001)

Let’s honour the release of Manic Street Preachers‘ new album by talking about an album that is easily the most underrated piece of greatness in their catalogue. No, not Lifeblood although some of you might have expected that from me as I’ve several times mentioned its personal importance to me. Lifeblood’s a very clear hate it or love it kind of album and it frequently gets a whole load of fans to speak in its favour. No, it’s just divisive, not underrated per se. This article shall instead speak in favour of an album that often not only attracts dislike, but even the people who speak in its favour admit that there’s something very wrong with it. Today we talk about the moment in the band’s history when they decided to not give a flying shit about anything and released a sprawling mess of an album that doesn’t even attempt to have any sort of stylistic or aural unity.

After the two hit album streak of 1996’s orchestral Everything Must Go and 1998’s introspective and gorgeous This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours, Manics found themselves in the public spotlight in a way that made them feel uncomfortable. Sure, the band always wanted to be big but all of a sudden their gigantic popularity and streak of hit singles had caused them to become the flavour of the month which the band grew tired of. They had finally reached the popularity they wanted but, typically to the band, instead of relishing in it they decided to react against it. The 2000 stand-alone single “The Masses Against the Classes” showcased the group in a more furious, energetic and rawer sound than they had been for years. After Masses/Classes, the band holed themselves up in Spain and began work on the album that would be their intentional self-destruction. Songs were written, performed and recorded with max speed – no more than three play-throughs were allowed before recording the song with as few takes possible. The band wanted to bring back their rawer, more energetic and aggressive past yet at the same time take advantage of their experience in crafting more melodic songs; the result being that countless different ideas were thrown around, recorded in various ways and sometimes even mixed together. The sessions grew so fruitful that at some point the band wanted simply to release absolutely everything they recorded in the form of a double album or two different albums Use Your Illusion style.

Eventually those sessions laboured Know Your Enemy. 16 tracks (and one hidden track), bouncing from 3-minute punk rockers to keyboard-heavy Beach Boys pastiches, from ramshackle acoustic ballads to drum-machine driven weariness, from spoken word angst to [i]disco[/i]. The c-part of a song left out of the album was separated and tacked on as a mid-album hidden track. The band’s bassist who can’t sing does his lead vocal debut while a man who had never written a lyric in the band’s entire career does his lyrical debut. Even the band’s regular lyricist goes from introspective misery through half-arsed political brainfarting to things that plain do not make sense. The track order hops wildly between pretty much everything with no seeming direction or plain sense. The album was previewed by the simultanous release of two completely different singles.

Know Your Enemy does not make sense. It’s a gigantic, schizophrenic mess. It’s why the band’s fans regularly put it up as one of their least favourite albums and why “make your own KYE tracklisting” topics are such a popular sight. It’s why I love it to bits.
Amidst the rampart messiness and seeming direction-free approach, Know Your Enemy does contain a core style around which all the other random things are scatter to. It’s what you could call the band’s main direction during the sessions. They are the roughly produced ramshackle rockers and weary pop songs, driven forward by rambly acoustic guitar and backed by their fuzzed up electric counterparts. “Ocean Spray”, one of the album’s singles as well as practically the only song still regularly performed live from the otherwise-forgotten album, and frontman James Dean Bradfield’s lyrical debut, is the best showcase for this side. Melancholy weariness present throughout the song and acoustic guitar driving the rhythm before being drowned into a wall of messy electric rock. But no song is without some sort of added addition to the sound: in Ocean Spray’s case it’s the mournful trumpet replacing the traditional guitar solo, solemnly playing its beautiful melody.

Ocean Spray

The rest of this side shows some of the album’s finest moments. The jangly “The Year of Purification” takes its inspiration from the IRS-era R.E.M. but rather un-Stipely goes on bitterly about “liberal asinine pricks” and some such. “His Last Painting” goes through its three minutes simplistically and without much change, relying on the strength of its melodies and steady pace before finally tearing itself apart and fading away instrument by instrument. The pounding “Epicentre” relies on a piano as its lead detail, switching from the clangy, punched notes of the verse to the elegant later on during the song, while “Let Robeson Sing” takes the guise of a sunny gospel song and enchants not only with its melodies but its rich backing vocals.

The other half of the main core are the dirty rock songs, primarily dominated by James’ gruff shouts and guitar noise. The co-lead single “Found That Soul” opens the album with a storming three-minute guitar blast (accentuated by one-note piano whacking) that never stops for a breath. The lyrics of “Intravenous Agnostic” do not even try to make sense but its frenetic and downright neurotic drive, including one of Bradfield’s more insane solo moments, sum up the album’s madman nature to a T. Both “Dead Martyrs” and “My Guernica” take a heavy lo-fi approach, sounding like they’re recorded through a phone, that suits their messy nature perfectly. The epic centrepiece and culmination of everything however is the six-minute “The Convalescent” that goes from 0 to full speed instantly and practically never lets go throughout its length. Sure its chorus and bridge slow down things, but when the lyric is a near stream-of-consciousness rant and the song climaxes into a fervourous and shouty orgy of backing vocals and blazing instruments, the whole song feels like its on out-of-control fire.

But it’s the oddball tracks that really divide opinion. Know Your Enemy is Manics at what is possibly their most experimentive, not necessarily in style but in the sheer fact that they’ve actually put this stuff on an album. “So Why So Sad” differs from the whole rest of the album not only in the fact that it’s a shinily produced song full of keyboards (so much it’s really hard to hear Bradfield’s guitar underneath them) and with a seemingly random synth solo of all things, but also because it’s a summery, hook-filled pop giant that’s constantly accompanied by an armada of backing vocals, not the least of which are the “ba ba ba”s that form a big part of the rhythm section of the song. The bassist Nicky Wire, whose rough and untrained ’singing’ has already seen increased appearances throughout the album in terms of backing vocals gets his lead vocal semi-debut (technically, he sang lead on one of the b-sides to the album’s lead single(s) but this is his album debut) on the murky “Wattsville Blues”. Wire’s gruffy voice spits hatred and apathy (”life is killing me”, “don’t want no fuckin’ friends”, “useless motherfuckers knocking at my door”, etc) over an increasingly frantic drum machine before the bouncy, funked-up chorus jumps out of nowhere and Bradfield takes the lead vocal – albeit still assisted by Wire’s shouting in the back. “Miss Europa Disco Dancer”, like the title suggests, goes full-on disco. Glimmering keyboards, funky bass, disco guitar and starry-eyed glammour fill the space as the band proceeds to have the fun of their lives, only for Wire to appear again at the end of the track and lead the song to its fadeaway end with his endless “braindead motherfuckers” chant.

At 16 full-length tracks, 17 if you count the hidden track – a cover of McCarthy’s “We’re All Bourgeois Now” which is pretty much identical to the original musically – it’d be surprising if there were no faults of any kind anywhere. And I’ll admit it – those of you who have heard the album and are reading this have probably shaken their heads at least once during my ravings before, and those who end up hearing the album in the future will most likely find something, or a lot, to complain about. And yes, Know Your Enemy isn’t faultless. Surprisingly, the biggest mistake isn’t in the actual music but the lyrics. Wire’s annoyance and desire to reach out to the past political sloganeering shows up throughout the album but while most of KYE’s verbal work is pretty good in this reviewer’s opinion, whenever Wire goes political the songs end up tripping in clichés and cringe. Some songs are almost ruined by it: it took me ages to realise how great the musical backing, especially in the verses and their hypnotic jangle, of “Baby Elián” is because the horridly cringeworthy lyrics (”America, the devil’s playground”. Please?) kept distracting me. The political lyrics are in the minority but Wire’s bitterness during the era continues to show on the album’s rather confrontational style. But musically? I love this album. The only song that comes close to being a bit weak is “Royal Correspondent”, a gloomy drum machine -driven political dirge which does not lend itself to much listening without slightly burning out, but it’s a very small weak spot.

But the thing is, you most likely won’t agree. That’s the nature of Know Your Enemy. That’s the purpose of Know Your Enemy. Lest we forget, it was an album that was meant to destroy the band’s popularity and reduce the fanbase to its core. It’s an album that even the band members didn’t much care about even during its release – almost half the album was never performed live during the extensive tour and few songs only ever got an acoustic performance or two. It would be foolish to deny that Know Your Enemy is a mess. It’s its point.

But it’s a mess I deeply love.

Found That Soul

MP3: Epicentre
MP3: Intravenous Agnostic

Know Your Enemy on Amazon: UK / US

(I have now officially taken over Mag’s Grammatics in the tag cloud with a personal favourite of mine. HA!)

Tags: 12 Overlooked Pieces of Awesome, Manic Street Preachers

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 19th, 2009 at 9:53 pm and is filed under Retrospective. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.