Album: Manic Street Preachers

Sometimes, you have to walk off a distance to reorient yourself with your surroundings and discern the right direction to take. This is what seems to have happened with the Manic Street Preachers, who on 2004's Lifeblood appeared to have lost much of their impetus, replacing their fiery spirit with an approach that sounded like they were trying to emulateColdplay. In the interim, both Nicky Wire and James Dean Bradfield have released solo albums from which they have emerged with a new focus and determination.

Wire describes Send Away the Tigers as an attempt to reclaim the "element of fabulous disaster" that marked the Manics' earliest work, when they dreamed of combining the revolutionary spirit of the Pistols and The Clash with the mainstream success of Guns N'Roses. Accordingly, the amps have been turned back up to 11 on tracks like the Def Leppard-esque "I'm Just a Patsy" and "Send Away the Tigers" itself. Built around one of Wire's gestalt lyrical connections - between Tony Hancock's drinking motto and the stupid "liberation" of animals from Baghdad Zoo - the song is about having to live with the consequences of one's decisions.

It's a suitably muscular opening to an album primarily concerned with betrayal and hard-won wisdom. After the stodgy bombast of Lifeblood, it's uplifting to hear an old-school Manics anthem such as "The Second Great Depression", with its dramatic chording adding heft to the sense of political disillusion which will be Blair's lasting legacy: "When first equals worse than best, just forget about the rest." The mood of political engagement continues with "Rendition", about the decision by the US to dispense with the Geneva Convention on Human Rights in favour of imprisonment without trial - although they steer clear of knee-jerk anti-Americanism on the strutting rocker "Imperial Bodybags".

Elsewhere, the classic quiet verse/ loud chorus dynamic is applied to "Underdogs", while The Cardigans' Nina Persson duets on the new single "Your Love Alone is Not Enough" - though her voice gets rather swept away. It's not a completely successful collection - there's something hollow about "Winterlovers", and I could dispense with the lumbering power ballad "Autumnsong" - but the third seasonal-themed piece, "Indian Summer", makes up for them with intelligent lyrics about the need to get through youthful spasms of soured idealism without slipping into barren cynicism. It may be the best advice they've ever given; or, indeed, taken.

DOWNLOAD THIS: 'Indian Summer', 'Imperial Bodybags', 'The Second Great Depression', 'Send Away the Tigers'