Manic Street Preachers - The Holy Bible (CD 1997)

The album is the best 1 they have done without a doubt.The american 1 sounds more crunchy than this 1.The japanese has the 4 extra live tracks.Its rated in the tpo hundred albums of all time.

'The Holy Bible', first and foremost, is not for the feint hearted. It is a political, religious, at times nihilistic leap into a troubled mind. Unlike previous albums, Richey James Edwards is the main lyricist - writing freely on love, life and death - with lead singer James Dean Bradfield perfectly adopting Edwards' poetic words and making them his own, with peculiar phrasing resulting in extreme syllabic extension, followed by extensive sentences shoved into tiny gaps - all of which adds to the album's impenetrable appeal. As for the songs, each is unique, and yet they are all fast-paced and all interconnected. The intriguingly named 'Ifwhiteamericatoldthetruthforonedayitsworldwouldfallapart' is seemingly an attack on today's predominantly rich, white society, whilst 'Die In The Summertime' is a graphic hatred of life. Singles 'She Is Suffering' and 'Faster' are predictably more accessible, but that by no means degrades their content; both being matt black in colour and infinite in size. The spoken intro to 'Of Walking Abortion' is a haunting reminder of Edwards' unstable state - on February 1st 1995, he disappeared and is yet to be found. Ironically, his disappearance boosted sales, and likenesses with Kurt Cobain fuelled inevitable comparisons with Nirvana's epic In Utero. But even without the added mistique of Edwards' tragic disappearance, this album is a cavernous hole of thoughts and fears... an album of ugly honestly, set to a modern-day backdrop. To quote the excerpt from the back cover, "You live attached to moral and social conventions you despise... that's the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world".