Gold Against The Soul - Manic Street Preachers

This was the latest album I brought from the Manic Street Preachers, having been a fan of both their most up to date stuff and older albums. This is a relatively unknown work from them, though is really an excellent album and deserves more than the shunning that some people do to it. This is the second album made by the Welsh band, The Manic Street Preachers, following from ‘Generation Terrorists’. It was released in 1993 under the Sony label. This is perhaps one of their lesser-known albums after their start it was followed by the Holy Bible which was Richey James at his tortured best and really forgotten with the new stuff without James. ...  Read the complete review

Gold Against the Soul is very much the forgotten album as far as the Manic Street Preachers are concerned. The rabid fans dismiss it as the band's Bon Jovi phase, the band members pretend it never happened and the general public only really get to hear one single. Personally, it gets quite a lot of play on my stereo. Is it really that bad? It is true that in general the band's sound has been smoothed out a lot for this effort, and there are an awful lot of twiddly but fairly unexciting guitar solos in the mix. Gone is the rather charming enthusiastic ineptitude of the band's earliest work. However, there are also some fantastic riffs, and Richey Edwards's ...  Read the complete review

MANIC STREET PREACHERS - GOLD AGAINST THE SOUL ----------------------------------------------- Well Im sure most readers will have heard of the Manic Street Preachers, the band has had a fair few top ten singles and albums over the last few years, with singles such as 'A Design for life' and 'Everything must go' The four Members of the band were all born in a small mining town in Wales, this is where all of there working class political ...  Read the complete review

The point at which the Manic Street Preachers lost their magical edge is a constant source of debate. Some consider when they sold out and signed to Sony against all they said before was the end, others the moment Richey Edwards left and they decided to carry on as a trio. Others however put the blame squarely on this, their second ever album. Having said that, it really is not such a bad record as it may appear. ?Gold Against the Soul? was a big move following the Manics first album ?Generation Terrorists?. The first was pure punk rock with the aim of being as obnoxious and destructive as possible. And they did it well, with this album being much more of a ...  Read the complete review

It’s eight years since this album was released to cries that Manic Street Preachers were ‘selling out’ with a very ‘grungey’ album designed to appeal to the American market. Well, just like Krusty the Clown, selling out is what the Manics have always been about. They proclaim to be Marxists but said they wanted to sell 30 million records on one of the biggest record labels in the world. Gold Against The Soul has never been regarded with much fondness by anyone, including the band, but excluding me. I bought my copy in 1996, after Everything Must Go and The Holy Bible (I bought all four at the time in reverse chronological order). ...  Read the complete review