The Daily Telegraph
Saturday February 8 1992
MANIC Street Preachers have been An Issue in the music press for some months. Those against think they are useless punk revivalists, and scoff at their squealing guitars, Welsh roots (regional abuse is fashionable in the music press) and po-faced sloganeering. Their supporters think the group's music is an inspired pot-pourri of rock's past spiced with some invigoratingly confrontational ideas and enthuse about their punk-meets-heavy-metal tunes.
I'm with the enthusiasts. The Manic Street Preachers' stated plan was to release one double LP, become international stars and then split up to show the futility of celebrity. Whether or not that plan is prudent or possible, it has encouraged them to make an unexpectedly ambitious record; and if it fails, it does so in a way that is far more exciting than most successes. The record's packaging gives the first clue that there might be a fairly lively intelligence at work here. Each song is coupled with a suitable quote, the band's personal literary anthology of hopelessness and alienation, taken not just from the expected rebel heroes of today's popular culture - William Burroughs, Nietzsche, Public Enemy's Chuck D - but also from the likes of Ibsen, Camus, e. e. cummings and Philip Larkin.
Their songs - which, unusually for a group so concerned with saying things, make remarkably potent pop music - aim to echo the same feelings. Some of the lyrics are clumsy and banal, and many of their targets are predictable: the monarchy, financial institutions, the male psyche (on the LP's finest tune, Little Baby Nothing, featuring porn star Traci Lords on little-girl-victim vocals) and religion.
It's their less frantic sentiments that strike the most persuasive tone. "It's not that I can't find worth in anything," they sing at one point, "It's just that I can't find worth in enough" - and suddenly their despair seems rather reasonable.
Their most successfully confrontational song is an anti-royalty, anti-nationalism barrage called Repeat. Time was when such a song would have created a merry furore, but its recent appearance in the Top 40 went almost unnoticed. If anything threatens the success of Generation Terrorists, it's that it's getting hard to shock people these days.