Everything Must Go (1996)

The material is important. Any composer will tell you. Without a good material, the production value can only cover a certain texture, the guitar parts can only numb the ears for a while. The material is important. It gives a band the foundation on which they stand. And at a time when Manic Street Preachers had lost their lyricist / guitarist due to empty uncertainty, all they had was good stuff.

But for Nicky Wire, bassist and secondary lyricist, this task proved daunting, as he was now the main songwriter and idea person for the group. Vocalist / guitarist James Dean Bradfield also found himself under pressure, not knowing how to fix his music without Edwards’ intellect to guide them. But with the Edwards family’s blessing to keep playing and the serendipitous opportunity to work with producer Mike Hedges, the Welsh trio reunited at Chateau De La Rouge Motte, France in 1995 to record their fourth album, one that took a lot out of them. part of what they wanted. he had fought beforehand.

Interestingly, given the sinister and bleak setting the band found themselves in, ‘Everything Must Go’ turned out to be a much more joyous record than ‘Gold Against The Soul’ (1993) or ‘The Holy Bible’ (1994). Where ‘Bible’ lacked any complicated instrumentation other than some spiral solos, ‘Everything’ was adorned with bee-bop harmonies, beautiful string work, and reserved orchestration. Featuring jangly rockers ‘Kevin Carter’ and the title track at the center of the album, the skiffle belter ‘Elvis Impersonator: Blackpool Pier’ opening the album and the sumptuous acoustic ballad ‘Small Black Flowers That Grow in the Sky’ closing the second half. This record proved to be a great Britpop record as archetypal as any other released in 1996. As befitting, it is only the ending track ‘No Surface All Feeling’ that would have fitted into ‘Bible’; by the way, it’s also the only song on the record that features Edwards’ guitar playing.

Edwards’s shadow runs through the record (some of the leftover lyrics were used on the album), but this turned out to be the album Wire made the decisions on. ‘A Design For Life’ proved its calling card, what ‘Faster’ was to Edwards (a fixture of anarchic sentiments detailing the fall and failures of mankind), ‘Design’ was to Wire (the so-called socialist proclaimed to the plight of his fellow workers). Wire, more aware of the impact of singles than his mentor, gave ‘Design’ a chorus eternally ingrained in the minds of festival audiences for generations to come, giving the band a much-needed non-British. 2 hit. ‘Australia’ and ‘Further Away’ continued this trend of singing choirs, recognizing that the modern music market favored 45 records over records. Edwards’s words, used in ‘The Girl Who Wanted To Be God’ and ‘Small Black Flowers ..’ showed that the band had not lost its taste for violence.

The biggest revelation on the record is how competent singer James Dean Bradfield proved to be. Always a better singer than his contemporaries Brett Anderson, Jarvis Cocker or Damon Albarn, previous records emphasized the volume of his guitar parts, which means that his voice tended to appear abrasive and loud. Here, he takes a much more nuanced approach, giving a soulful resonance to the saturated pop of ‘Kevin Carter’, a quiet whispered chant of ‘Enola / Alone’, while the lead track chorus is only mere notes from the opera. This, plus booming stacattos and a beautiful orchestration, and you’ve got a quintessential pop record.

You can’t help but feel happy for the band, nineteen years later. A strong reinvention that turned out to be a commercial success, a solid new direction, and an innovative pop structure, ‘Everything’ turned out to be the band’s second consecutive masterpiece. Where ‘Bible’ managed to sound completely alien to any other band, ‘Everything’ managed to adapt to the pop movement and demonstrate its superiority over other Britpop bands.