A triumph of dignity and style over potentially crippling adversity, Everything Must Go is the most underrated album of the year – in this country, anyway, where the Manics have been running into a brick wall of indifference since 1992's Generation Terrorists. The band's songwriting and stacked-vocal-and-guitar splendor have grown by leaps and bounds from shotgun-pop pugnacity into something a lot more interesting – Abbey Road with tenement-block attitude; Give 'Em Enough Rope as produced by Phil Spector. But in February 1995, the Manics were blindsided by the disappearance of guitarist and lyricist Richey James, a case still unsolved by the British police. On Everything Must Go, singer and guitarist James Dean Bradfield, bassist Nicky Wire and drummer Sean Moore confront their nightmare head-on – the baffling loss, the frustrating lack of answers – and battle their way to daylight. A gnawing sense of dark stasis hovers over the record: The rainbow glow of the orchestral score in "A Design for Life" is tinged with irritable despair in Bradfield's soaring, caustic voice. Yet for all of the images of crisis and escape in these songs, Everything Must Go is a record of painstaking melodic craft and thundering execution, a proclamation of physical and emotional cleansing – up to a point. In the CD booklet, the Manics have included a quote from the artist Jackson Pollock: "The pictures I contemplate painting would constitute a halfway state and an attempt to point out the direction of the future – without arriving there completely." In other words, they're still waiting for James. (RS 750/751)

DAVID FRICKE