Manic Street Preachers: Know Your Enemy : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

After years of promising greatness and falling short, the Manic Street Preachers finally delivered the goods with 1996's Everything Must Go -- an epic album that struck the perfect balance between bombast and melody. But just as quickly as everything came together for the Welsh pop-punk band, it fell apart. The follow-up, This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours, consisted mostly of songs that sounded like Foreigner rejects, while the arrival of the band's sixth album hardly assuages matters. Know Your Enemy finds the Manics at wit's end, bouncing between the shouty, bare-knuckled thrashers of their early years ("Intravenous Agnostic," "Dead Martyrs") and unbelievably lightweight pop fluff ("The Year of Purification," "So Why So Sad"). Nowhere amidst all the confusion is there even a worthwhile tune to be salvaged. Hideously dull. (AIDIN VAZIRI -- April 24, 2001)