It's packed with soaring string arrangements, massive choruses, guitar pyrotechnics, guest spots, and a gospel choir that shows up on four tracks. It's big, colorful, and determined in a way this band has pretty much perfected.
Everything here feels bigger than it ought to be, and to the album's credit, this aesthetic consistently overlays the whole thing; the curtain is never pushed aside to reveal the tangled mess of pulleys and disinterested stagehands in the wings.
This lack of organic feeling, when paired with the continuous mention of “commercial” aims, becomes troubling.
On the one hand, nobody believes that the next Manics record is going to be some sort of unfathomably obtuse excursion in drindcore. On the other, the fact that Postcards... is for the most part a foray into Seventies-style AOR and power-pop (think: Supertramp, ELO) suggests that the band aren’t entirely serious about gunning for 2010 chart gold here.
Sadly, by 2010 we're back to the orchestral blah sound again and an album where I can't work out whether it's better or worse than the previous low point 'Lifeblood' - it's not a question you want to ponder too long.
This is the cheapest sounding Manics album thus far (yuck gospel vocals, yuck guitar sound, yuck yuck yuck), there's something 'petrol station rack' about the quality, more what how you'd expect a Robbie Williams, no, a Ronan Keating album to sound like.
That's not good, 15 out ... read more
Ok next album up in the manics ranking series and unfortunately I don’t have much to say about this one other than that it’s a direct continuation of the “attempting to reach the mainstream” trend of manics albums that Send Away The Tigers started. This isn’t even how the album feels to me, it’s directly specified by James Dean Bradfield himself this was an effort to reach the charts and get hits again. Nicky Wire has said something very similar in the ... read more
1 | (It's Not War) Just The End Of Love 3:28 | 83 |
2 | Postcards From A Young Man 3:36 | 72 |
3 | Some Kind Of Nothingness 3:50 feat. Ian McCulloch | 84 |
4 | The Descent (Pages 1 & 2) 3:27 | 78 |
5 | Hazelton Avenue 3:24 | 81 |
6 | Auto-Intoxication 3:48 feat. John Cale | 77 |
7 | Golden Platitudes 4:24 | 82 |
8 | I Think I Found It 3:07 | 80 |
9 | A Billion Balconies Facing The Sun 3:39 feat. Duff McKagan | 81 |
10 | All We Make Is Entertainment 4:15 | 84 |
11 | The Future Has Been Here 4Ever 3:39 | 78 |
12 | Don't Be Evil 3:18 | 75 |
#14 | / | MOJO |
#18 | / | Q Magazine |
#19 | / | Uncut |
#36 | / | Gigwise |
#44 | / | NME |