Everything Must Go

The Manic Street Preachers are about my age, and grew up some seven or eight miles down the road from where I did. The first time I saw them they were on TV, and I felt an acute - misplaced - embarrassment on their behalf. They were gawkily, earnestly pretentious, gabbling away in their broad valleys accents - the same accent I'd striven to mask and suppress during my student years in London. Their presence showed up the folly of my own pretentions to urbane sophistication.

I've always been interested in their career by virtue of the local-boys-made-good angle, but only some of their music has ever grabbed me - I wouldn't quite call myself a fan. I do have a soft spot for Everything Must Go, however. I bought it on cassette soon after its release in mid-'96, which was a painfully difficult time for me. I was in Rome, ostensibly living the cosmopolitan dream, but felt isolated, stressed & depressed thanks to my awful job.

This album, together with an unwise excess of alcohol, espresso and Toscanelli cigars, afforded a therapeutic catharsis that helped drag me from one difficult day to the next. Even then, I didn't like it all: churlish as it may be to complain about their presence, Richey Edwards' lyrics just aren't my cup of tea. Not all of the anthemic moments fully connected with me either, but the high-points, which, to my mind include 'Enola/Alone', the title-track, 'Australia' and 'No Surface All Feeling' more than made up for that. I'll always be grateful to the band for this record.

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Complete String Quartets

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Ein Schattenspiel, etc.

Georg Friedrich Haas is a contemporary Austrian composer of "art music". "Haas's style recalls that of György Ligeti in its use of micropolyphony, microintervals and the exploitation of the overtone series; he is often characterized as a leading exponent of spectral music" says wikipedia. Only a relative few of his many compositions have been issued on CD - many more of them can be found on YouTube. On this 2020 disc are three of his works in which standard classical instrumentation is augmented and altered by "live electronics". Two are string quartets and one is for solo piano. Is a string quartet still really a quartet if there are meanwhile some other people with laptops busily twizzling the sound? There is a live performance video of the 'String Quartet No. 7', the first work on the disc, where the JACK Quartet are supplemented by a trio of sound boffins to realise the composition. Whether it's properly a quartet or a septet is neithe...

Onslow

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