Album Review: Manic Street Preachers, "Generation Terrorists"

With so much hype and press behind them in the last year, one immediately starts looking for faults. However, 18 tracks down the line and I am still trying to think of one bad thing to say. Each song oozes with a freshness and attitude hard to match and cuts across with striking maturity.

Don't be fooled by the punky/glam trash image, the MANIC STREET PREACHERS approach their music with tremendous care. James Dean Bradfield has the gutsiest, purist voice I've heard in a long while, and, when not vocally employed, whips down some mean guitar, including the excellent singles "Loves Sweet Exile" and "Stay Beautiful." Generation Terrorists displays the Preachers attacking some hard-nerved rockers and also shows them to be masters off the ballad. "Little Baby Nothing" features the backing vocals of an American ex-porn-star and boasts a truly stunning melody.

With only occasionally laboured moments, the misfits from the valleys have served up some of the hottest rock'n'roll I've heard for a while and thankfully without any of the cliches.

Essential listening.

Grade A

Mike Harris

Riff Raff

March 1992

Revenge...?

Riff Raff was a legendary rock magazine based in London in the late 1980s and 1990s. Edited by the ultimate music biz insider, Mark Crampton, and employing such talents as Mark Blake, Jerry Ewing, Mike Harris, Paul Smith, Chris Collingwood, Alan McCrorie, Simon Robinson, Lyn Guy, Anna Marx, Nick Douglas, Marion Garden, Peter "Grunty" Grant, Joe "The Crow" Mackett, Billy "The Kluck" Kulke, and, lastest and mostest, the incredible Liddell Brothers, Mark (a.k.a. "El Perro") and Colin (a.k.a. "Der Fly"). Unfortunately, Riff Raff was just too R n' R for its own good. A genuine working class rock mag, written, edited, and translated into 16 European languages in a drug-N-Jack-D-fuelled haze, often on the back of motorbikes, with spell checking by our staff of attentive rock bimbos (chosen purely for their blondeness and big knockers), it soon fell behind more trainspotterly, nerdish, and politically correct publications like Q, Kerrang, Mojo, Metal Hammer, and Horse & Hound. This website is an archive and kind of shrine dedicated to the writing of its greatest writers, some of whom, luckily for the Rock Kosmos, still continue to write about music. This is the REVENGE of Riff Raff...Rock on!