Manic Street Preachers: "This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours" (Epic)

The dust has finally settled around the Manics' explosive myth, and suddenly everything seems clear and straightforward. The fifth album by the Manic Street Preachers is an eerily serene affair, the sound of a band savouring the post-apocalyptic stillness. This Is My Truth is the first Manics album to feature no lyrics by their missing guitarist, Richey Edwards, and as such it represents an almost complete break from the Preachers' turbulent past.

Richey's spectre haunts fragile tunes such as You're Tender And You're Tired and Nobody Loved You, but the prevailing mood is one of reflection and quiet but firm resistance. The scattershot venom of past albums has been replaced by a more measured vitriol, and even the strongly accusatory tone of SYMM (a song about the Hillsborough disaster addressed to the South Yorkshire police force) is tempered by an air of resignation. The chart-topping single, If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next takes an almost passive stance, leaving it up to you to decide to do the right thing. Ditto Ready For Drowning, which laments the submerged dreams of a generation, and The Everlasting, an almost elegaic backwards glance. If you're looking for the stormy riffs and orchestral cyclone of Everything Must Go, you might find the going a bit calm, especially during the album's second half, but if, like The Manics, you're trying to pluck a kernel of inner peace from the furious flurry of life, you might like to listen to their truth. Kevin Courtney