Manic Street Preachers - The Holy Bible

The Holy Bible is the third studio album by Welsh alternative rock band Manic Street Preachers, originally released in August 1984 via Epic Records.

With samples plucked from documentaries about sex workers, imagery focusing on German death camps and a visceral edge that never lets up, The Holy Bible is a record whose existence and subject matter has offered a convenient shorthand for explaining the disappearance of Manics member Richey James Edwards in February of 1995. Nobody in a tiny studio in the Welsh capital was deluded enough to view this ferocious record as a likely commercial smash.

It’s an album that’s taken on an extra layer of ugliness that suits the much-scrutinised circumstances surrounding its creation – but it’s worth stepping back a little and remembering that, at its core, this was the product of a band boldly standing out amongst its peers.

Only in that brief moment in the '90s, when the record industry was grappling with the impact of alternative rock going mainstream and just as Brit-pop was hitting its stride, could the Manics release such a dark, difficult album on a major label, get it played on such pop-oriented programs as Top of the Pops and MTV’s Most Wanted, and make appearances at the Glastonbury and Reading festivals.

And then, in a flash, it was over. Richey James went missing on February 1, 1995, and after that The Holy Bible was frozen in amber, forever seen as his last will and testament. After James' disappearance, plans for an American release of the LP were shelved

The Holy Bible is a bleak, introspective, insular album that's bracing in its darkness. It's not that The Holy Bible deliberately alienates listeners, but that it wears its pain too openly and presents it too vividly to be an easy listen. It can be a cathartic experience, but it's the kind of experience that doesn't lend itself to everyday listening, but it is a bracing rock album, quite unlike any LP before or since.

This 20th anniversary box set offers a means to flesh out the story of  The Holy Bible, including a sample of the nose-bleed peppered final Astoria performances, contemporary B-sides and the hefty American mix, which the band concedes actually trumps the original in parts. Its foregrounding of the music – the responsibility of drummer Sean Moore and, more particularly, singer James Dean Bradfield – serves to remind us all that the primary reason for focusing on the Manics’ third studio LP is its position as one of the greatest rock records of all time.

Check out the tracks: “Faster”; “Revol” and “She Is Suffering”.

This LP record is a 2015 reissue on 180 gram vinyl with a printed inner sleeve and remastered audio, pressed in Europe via Columbia Records.