Album of the 'Week': 'Journal For Plague Lovers'

The Manic Street Preachers are, as Simon Price argues in his brilliant and infuriating masterwork 'Everything', the band that mattered the most to their fans since The Smiths. Arguably this title was wrestled from them by The Libertines, partially because The Libertines are more interesting in terms of narrative, but largely because of the Manics' truly staggering backslide in terms of musical quality.

From 1994's 'The Holy Bible' to 1999's 'This Is My Truth, Tell Me Yours' (an album with a title long enough to merit a comma) the Manics made scythingly beautiful pop music, allied to gauché and memorable lyrics - their grandiosity and naivité making them the perfect antidote to Britpop's music-hall/football crowd stylings. Then came one of the worst albums ever made by a great band, and my personal departure from the Manics, 'Know Your Enemy'. Mere words cannot describe how shit the album is, but they can go some way. It was clattering, pretentious, ugly and stupid - it contained songs defending the former Soviet Union and attacking Royal Correspondents (how controversial!). This album was trailed as a return to form - it arrived as a terrible disappointment. I'd like to deride the albums released since 'Know Your Enemy', but I've scarcely heard them - they have some good songs, but that does not make them worth weathering.

So, another album, another return to form. 'Journal For Plague Lovers' re-engaged the music press and lapsed fans through a wonderful piece of grave-robbing, using for its lyrics notebooks bequeathed to the band by missing lyricist and guitarist Richey Edwards. The look and sound of the album is clearly based on that of 'The Holy Bible', the last Edwards-era Manics album, and it delivers on the promise. If it's merely an exercise in nostalgia, it's an exercise which has led them back to the well of decent music, from the lake of shite where, for a decade, they have pitched camp.

The lyrics of 'Journal For Plague Lovers', compared to their contemporaries used on 'The Holy Bible', lack density and focus. Whereas 'The Holy Bible' offers lists of demagogues, 'Journal For Plague Lovers' gives us jokes - "me and Stephen Hawking...we missed the Sex Revolution when we failed the physical". Some of the lyrics would have benefited immensely from being left in the book - Doors Closing Slowly's opening couplet "Realise how lonely this is/Self-defeating? Oh fuck yeah" is one of the worst lyrics ever committed to tape. There are still flashes of brilliance - "the Levi jean will always/be stronger than the Uzi" being a particular favourite - but the lyrics feel like what they are - the unwisely opened notebooks of a sadly insane man.

What has kept me listening to this album is what keeps all fans of the Manics listening to the Manics - the world-beating songwriting and singing of James-Dean Bradfield. On 'Journal For Plague Lovers' the discrepency in quality between the two elements of the songs becomes absurd. On 'Me and Stephen Hawking', James-Dean's giddy verses, sung at the edge of his vocal range, are a joy - the lyrics, including the phrase "Transgenic milk containing human protein", are an irritant. The anthemic 'Jackie Collins Existential Question Time' has a lyric which at first is amusing and becomes, through repetition, an annoyance ("if a married man fucks a Catholic"). But, give or take a few skipables, the Manics have made an album that repays listening, a fact as wonderful as it is unnerving.

Album of the Week: 'Dark Side of the Moon'

Having attacked the 'Holy Album' school of music appreciation, it seems absurd to focus on perhaps the holiest of holies, Pink Floyd's 'Dark Side of the Moon'. However, 'Dark Side of the Moon' is as much a victim of the 'Holy Album' way of listening as any number of stellar soul singles and non-Bob Marley reggae tunes. Its particular myth entirely precedes and overshadows it - stoners' plaything, synchronises with Wizard of Oz etc. etc.. If anything backs up the argument that the worship of the album puts commodity over content, it's the pants pictured above. You cannot listen to them.

Were you able to listen to the album through those pants, what would assail you would be music that is rocking and 'spacy' but also harsh and experimental. The alternating vocal parts of David Gilmour and Roger Waters' sum up the two different poles that tracks veer between. The sequencing of the heroic and absurd 'The Great Gig in the Sky' next to the biting, aggressive and not very good 'Money' make it obvious. In their inept, hippish way, 'The Floyd' strive for the transcendent, but the mundane and the downright awful keep exercising a pull.

The Syd Barrett-era, and post-'Dark Side' Pink Floyd albums, are packed with lyrics, which are not their forté - just thinking of the phrase "shine on, you crazy diamond" should make you shudder. But on 'Dark Side of the Moon', the lyrics are, for the most part, sparse - it's over 2 minutes into the first track that singing makes its first appearance. The lyrics that are left to stand in this space are better than most - the peerless 'Us and Them', deals with the horror of war in a way that's distant, tragic, and far from the idealism of 60s pacifism. In gloriously effette tones, the line "With, without/Who can deny it's what the fighting's all about?" sounds as though it comes from a suicidal, non-interventionist god. 'Time', while dealing with wasted lives and shattered dreams, as all good songs do, notches up one gem and one clanger - "hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way" and "the Sun is the same, in a relative way but you're older".

'Dark Side of The Moon' is not trippy, and not appropriate for the branding of novelty underpants. It is a measured, beautifully recorded, ambitious and stylish rock album. It created a synthesis between classical music (experimental and conventional) and popular music that was the well-spring for the self-conscious ambition of Radiohead (perhaps a mixed blessing), and its lyrical razing of the British post-war consensus laid the foundations for punk. It is not a relic or an icon, it's an album that remains relevant, and deserves consideration.