The Holy Bible

Great album with cool production, nice riffs, and potent lyrics. A tad long, but the rest is too good to not earn five stars.

4.5/5.0: Excellent

This album was a great listen. I considered dropping it a point for the narration but ultimately enjoyed this enough for a five anyway.

I’ve always heard of this band but I never knew what they sounded like until today. The first few songs really caught my attention, but that began to fade as the album went on.

The cover really turned me off, but the actual contents are great.

Dishwater indy.

Great album. I'd love to listen to it again. I had pigeonholed the band as pop, but I was wrong. 4/5

Weer een band die ik vrij vroeg in de collectie had, door de Chemical Brothers. Die mixte een en ander van deze band, waaronder 'Faster'. Dat nummer lijkt ergens weinig digitale versterking nodig te hebben. Net als het meeste op dit album heeft het al kracht genoeg van zichzelf. Ik snap het ook wel. Het is heerlijk gebruiken, die uitgespuugde harde medeklinkers: "I am an arKiteK-T". De zanger doet het erom, of hij moet Hollandse roots hebben. Maar in de delen met rustigere delen, is dit accent verdwenen. Dan heeft hij een zachtere radio-rock-klank. Het stomme is; op de een of andere manier werkt het. Het tilt het album boven de vergeetbare 3.

pô, até achei que gostaria, mas não me pegou muito não.
longe de ser das piores coisas que já apareceram aqui, mas não eh pra mim não... apesar das letras boas, nao eh nada demais, bem mediano.

There's a reason only one track from this made it on to their best of album.

An interesting listen. I enjoy how the Manics have blended a series of rock genres into something which is theirs alone. There are some stray artifacts from music of the time that’s not so much to my tastes but fall in the same ballpark as their Welsh countrymen Stereophonics. Talking of the Welsh, it’s nice to hear fragments of the native tongue on Revol, I only wish there was more of this.

The best bits are when it gets really wiry and angry. The worst bits are when its so-so lyrics are put under the spotlight.

As its name would suggest. The Holy Bible is an album that sits at the top of music. Unlike most albums to come out of this sphere of music in Britain in the mid-90s, this is a bleak look at the darkest aspects of human life. Prostitution, politics, mental disorders, and genocide are amongst the many topics that this album rages about throughout its 56-minute runtime. Richey Edwards, who is perhaps described as the band’s lead lyric conceptualist (as it was primarily his fellow bandmates who would arrange his ideas into viable songs) would disappear from the globe, presumably dead a few months after this record released.

In terms of the music, one of the most striking features here is that every song here is a driving rock banger, creating a perfect juxtaposition to the subject material of the album. The guitars sound phenomenal here and James Dean Bradfield’s vocals are perfect here. I don’t think anyone else could have performed these lyrics here any better as they manage to encapsulate the disillusion with life that this album was written with. The lyrics themselves are expertly written, where they convey the disposition in their writer while also retaining a bit of poetry and without being extremely in-your-face about it that one might expect with this kind of album. These elements combine to make one of the greatest listening experiences of the 90s.

This is one of the few albums that I call perfect, a 100/100.

*Strong lyrics and an intense listen
*Good punk/alternative sounds at times but pretty abrasive
*Would need several listens to get into

I’m at a 5.

Certainly not what I was expecting from the same band who had rather Britpop-y tones on “Everything Must Go” – this is a drearier, darker, cynical album that feels like a proper merging of the politically driven punk of the 1970s and the grunge of the early 1990s, coming to a head in a way that’s musically pleasing as hell, generally lyrically strong (save for the last track, to a degree), and overall, it just strikes me as immediately more memorable than their other album on the list. Granted, part of that is the disappearance of their lead writer / lyricist Richey Edwards, who wrote so many of the darker tracks here while he was going through deeply intense personal problems of his own. In a way, this feels almost like an autobiography of pain; less of a suicide note & more of a manifesto of frustrations about the world at large, written through a multitude of perspectives & frames that all somehow feel vivid, imagined, and all too real, even in their “worst” moments.

It’s a deeply honest album, and while I think you could maybe get away with not paying attention to the lyrics to a certain point, eventually this album’s penchant for its darker themes will catch up, and hit you over the head with some remarkably apt introductory quote, or a sonic soundscape that’s too forceful to ignore. I think the production on this thing is remarkably strong, and for 1994 in particular, it feels ahead of schedule. I listened to the original mix for this, but apparently, the US mix included in the 20th anniversary deluxe edition is the band’s preferred mix, and supposedly even better. I may need to prove that for myself.

This really does feel like nothing of the era; I guess the closest comparison, to some degree, are the two sides of the coin that were “Hypocrisy Is The Greatest Luxury” & “3 Years, 5 Months And 2 Days In The Life Of…”, but while those rap albums either suffered from pearl-clutching, heavy-handed “holier than thou” attitudes or outdated rhetoric in the name of an agenda, I think this album places no active judgment on the listener, instead acting as, well… a sermon. The name “Manic Street Preachers” makes a lot more sense now, given that this does feel like sitting in on one man’s crusade against the injustices of the world, framed through a lot of marginally radical, morally stretchy, and yet not wholly unjustified viewpoints. It’s food for thought to say the least, and I can’t say I find myself actively fighting back against anything here, save for the last track “P.C.P.”.

I chalk it down to the “political correctness” of 1994 being perhaps just a little too aggressive for the time; I do think the sort of push for less harmful language isn’t necessarily an equivalent to suppression of “freedom to say what you want”, but I can see how tiptoeing around it and losing sort of an edge to fight back against bullshit in light of that push could piss off people in the wrong way. However, I also just think that all the fear-mongering the song has just never came to pass – if it was a valid-ish fear back then, then I can’t really hate on it, but it’s certainly the track that’s aged the worst here. It’s still musically energetic as hell, though.

So, yes, it’s a 5, but I do think it’s an abrasive album at points; “The Intense Humming of Evil” being written from the cold, cruel, heartless perspective of a literal Nazi, for example, might be just a little too close to home, no matter how chillingly accurate that coldness probably is. The same applies for a track like “4st 7lb”, but in a different way; it’s a very open & honest perspective from the mindset of someone with anorexia, and it’s so vividly written that I can see the poor girl in that track mentally shrinking & thinning out in my head. When this album’s writing shines in that honest way, it can be a brutal mirror to the past & part of the present, but one that I think has aged in a fruitful & memorable way, even 31 years out. If the writing here feels too unsettling or the musicianship doesn’t strike the same way, I think the floor here is a 3, and I wouldn’t blame anyone for going there. I really liked it, though, and it’s certainly one of the most interesting albums we’ve gotten, even 645 in. Hence, the 5.

Just not my favorite.

llyrics are pretty dark but also good like the lyrics on this are awesome. and yeah the music is awesome as well so all around awesome!! it's like really angry and i think that's cool. wahoo

lyrically strong

Not likely to bring a smile to your face, but serious rock played very well.

I have adored the Manics from their first album Generation Terrorists. I admire their politics, Jame's voice, their strong lyrics and rousing melodies. This to me is one of their best albums on all levels, including packaging and is perhaps their most quintessential album. This is the Welsh gods at their best.

Dying without having listened to this would have been perfectly acceptable.

This was ok. Wasn't that memorable tbh. Preferred the other album of theirs I had previously - Everything Must Go

3 ⭐️