It’s always been difficult to overlook the gulf between the Manics’ meta-intellectual braggadocio and their pub-rock pompousness. When a band namesdrops Noam Chomsky and George Orwell, you expect better than lumpen, two-chord indie. Granted, Send Away The Tigers – a comeback album, no less, in the wake of 2004’s under performing Lifeblood – contains at least one cut-diamond moment. On single ‘Your Love Is Not Enough’, James Dean Bradfield’s pensioner’s wheeze hooks up with Nina Persson’s euro femme warble for a free-floating weepie that arguably trumps ‘The Love Of Richard Nixon’ as the Manics’ purest pop foray. Elsewhere, sadly, Tigers sees the group sinking deeper into middle-aged mediocrity, despite their obvious determination to blow off the cobwebs.
Capturing the record in microcosm is the title-track, wherein Dean Bradfield huffs to no great effect while Nicky Wire’s bass mopes mournfully in the background. Elsewhere, ‘Underdogs’ deals in the classic/hackneyed Manics tropes: putatively the song is an anthem for the downtrodden, the awkward, the unclean – but did it have to be quite such a ringer for something Queen might have put out in 1971? There’s already talk of Tigers being the Manics ‘return to form’ LP (much of this disseminated, it has to be said, by the band themselves). Actually, it’s something far less interesting: the sound of a group straining, and failing, to recapture glories long vanished. Time, chaps, to move on.