Manic Street Preachers
Send Away the Tigers
(Columbia)
It's not that this album is so good in itself that it is worth four stars, it's just such a relief that one of the most righteous bands of all time have pulled themselves up from the mire that was their last album, 2004's Lifeblood, and produced something approximating their mid-1990s commercial heights.
Where Lifeblood found the band bereft of ideas and desperately trying to emulate the chart success of 1997's Everything Must Go, Send Away the Tigers has them seeking new ground and finding fresh inspiration.
At their peak, the Manics were a peerless visceral thrill with raging working-class anger providing the philosophical backbone to some of the starkest, hardest-hitting tracks this side of an anvil.
