Manic Street Preachers
"Everything Must Go" CD (Epic)
Deciphering this album isn't easy. There's loss, bitterness, regret and, finally, a sense of annihilating everything - a sense of breaking glass and crushing stone into sand, then sweeping everything into the wind. This is an album which puts a bookend on the Manic Street Preachers' career. Rather, it ends one facet of it. Following Richey James' disappearance, the Manics took time off until they felt they finally had to finish what they had been working on when James vanished. This is the result - 12 songs of erasing the past, wiping the slate clean and searching for something new. Now that everything is gone, what's left? Tomorrow.