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Met dank aan de originele posters indien het niet door mij geript is...
Thanks to the original posters if not ripped by myself...

01 - Manic Street Preachers - Critical Thinking - Critical Thinking.flac 
02 - Manic Street Preachers - Critical Thinking - Decline & Fall.flac 
03 - Manic Street Preachers - Critical Thinking - Brushstrokes Of Reunion.flac 
04 - Manic Street Preachers - Critical Thinking - Hiding In Plain Sight.flac 
05 - Manic Street Preachers - Critical Thinking - People Ruin Paintings.flac 
06 - Manic Street Preachers - Critical Thinking - Dear Stephen.flac 
07 - Manic Street Preachers - Critical Thinking - Being Baptised.flac 
08 - Manic Street Preachers - Critical Thinking - My Brave Friend.flac 
09 - Manic Street Preachers - Critical Thinking - Out Of Time Revival.flac 
10 - Manic Street Preachers - Critical Thinking - Deleted Scenes.flac 
11 - Manic Street Preachers - Critical Thinking - Late Day Peaks.flac 
12 - Manic Street Preachers - Critical Thinking - Onemanmilitia.flac 
991 - auCDtect.log 
991 - Lossless Audio Checker.log 
992 - AccurateRipNotCorrectGaplessRip.log 
999 - cover.jpg 
999 - Discogs Downloaded Cover 01.jpg 
999 - Discogs Downloaded Cover 02.jpg 
999 - Discogs Downloaded Cover 03.jpg 
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Manic Street Preachers - Being Baptised.lrc 
Manic Street Preachers - Brushstrokes Of Reunion.lrc 
Manic Street Preachers - Critical Thinking.lrc 
Manic Street Preachers - Dear Stephen.lrc 
Manic Street Preachers - Decline & Fall.lrc 
Manic Street Preachers - Deleted Scenes.lrc 
Manic Street Preachers - Hiding In Plain Sight.lrc 
Manic Street Preachers - Late Day Peaks.lrc 
Manic Street Preachers - My Brave Friend.lrc 
Manic Street Preachers - Onemanmilitia.lrc 
Manic Street Preachers - Out Of Time Revival.lrc 
Manic Street Preachers - People Ruin Paintings.lrc 


Oor Review ---------------------
Reinier van der Zouw 3 februari 2025 album rock Manic Street Preachers Critical Thinking COLUMBIA/SONY MUSIC

Manic Street Preachers is een band die de Grote Vragen des levens natuurlijk nooit heeft geschuwd, maar op Critical Thinking begint de ondervraging van de luisteraar wel heel snel.
Het vijftiende album van de Welshmen is nog geen halve minuut onderweg als we al aan de tand gevoeld worden. ‘What happened to your critical thinking?’ klinkt het onder een
industriële muur van drums en gitaar. Los van het feit dat de verhouding tussen album en recensent zo meteen op scherp wordt gezet, is het natuurlijk ook een interessante vraag.
Denken we nog wel kritisch na of gaan we met z’n allen vrolijk en blindelings mee in, om maar wat te noemen, de opmars van AI?
Absoluut stof tot nadenken dus, materie die in de albumopener in ieder geval verpakt wordt in een vintage Manics-klassieker in de dop.

Maar als we onze kritische denkpet dan maar even opzetten, steekt de rest van het album daar toch wat flets bij af.
Behalve de leadvocalen van bassist en tekstschrijver Nicky Wire in de aanstekelijke single Hiding In Plain Sight horen we hier weinig vernieuwing of groei in de sound van de band.
Dat hoeft niet erg te zijn, maar aangezien we ook wel eens scherpere teksten van het drietal hebben gehoord, komt het album in zijn geheel toch wat gezapig over.
Wie heel graag nog eens een Manics-plaat wilde horen die muzikaal klinkt alsof hij twintig jaar geleden opgenomen had kunnen zijn, zal niet teleurgesteld worden.
maar eenieder die niet echt overtuigd is van de gospel van deze predikers zal door dit relaas niet bekeerd raken.


Exystence Review ---------------
Manic Street Preachers – Critical Thinking (2025)
Filed Under: indie-rock by driX — 5 Comments February 13, 2025

There’s a charming lack of cynicism to the Manic Street Preachers’ new album, Critical Thinking.
Despite concerning themselves explicitly with hyper-capitalism, managed decline, and political unrest, James Dean Bradfield, Nicky Wire, and Sean Moore can’t help but turn out something that sounds,
well, optimistic.
But this is the charged, gimlet-eyed optimism of the soapbox speaker: things are bad but they can get better, so you’d better listen in.
With each decisive chord change and stadium-sized melody, the Welsh trio render ideas you’d usually find in a political pamphlet or outraged tweet into slogans that could be
graffitied in five-foot tall letters on an overpass.
The Manics’ legions of fans will be pleased to hear that Critical Thinking, the group’s fifteenth album sees them in particularly Manics-y form.
Indeed, you can almost hear thousands of people belting out the choruses to ‘Brush Strokes of Reunion’ and ‘Hiding In Plain Sight’ in the same way they might
‘Motorcycle Emptiness’ or ‘A Design For Life’. These have ‘classic’ written all over them.
It’s an album of clearly defined verses and middle eights, of song title hooks, and singalong guitar melodies following singalong vocal melodies.
The way these songs orbit then arrive at choruses have a kind of gravitational inevitability to them.

The Manics’ thirty-nine years as a band is most evident on ‘Decline and Fall’, which deals in galactic heartland rock, all thunderous energy and chiming pianos;
Critical Thinking does a roaring trade in this variety of brawny, charged rock banger.
However, things get most interesting when the Manics switch things up.
It’s for this reason that the likes of ‘People Ruin Paintings’, with its bouncy energy and (slightly) less conventional structure, and ‘Late Day Peaks’,
which has an unexpected but no less welcome Japanese city pop vibe (where you can less obviously hear Bradfield straining to package lyrics into pre-written rhythms)
are some of the album’s strongest moments.

While these songs are machine-tooled for maximum impact, there are times when the lyrical content disrupts proceedings.
Take the opening track, ‘Critical Thinking’, an icy new wave tune in the vein of Kick-era INXS or The Blue Aeroplanes.
Lines about “free ports”, “smart meters”, and “skyscrapers of untruth” suggest the Manics may have come down with a mild case of the Matt Bellamies –
though it should be noted that Bradfield recovers this song with a well-timed “Fuck that!”.
‘One Man Militia’, written on the day of Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral, makes me wonder whether the phrase “rigid dogma” ever has a place in rock music.

These songs work best when they concern themselves with the particular rather than the universal.
Indeed, ‘Dear Stephen’, which concerns the time Morrissey sent a ‘Get well soon’ postcard to a teenage Nicky Wire, works far better as a
commentary on the state of the world than anything about “rigid dogma”.
The Manics would do well to remember that subtlety can deliver as much punch as a barked address or strident slogan.
The old adage ‘show don’t tell’ is critical.
As Anton Chekhov instructed, “don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”

To the uncynical, the occasional lyrical stinker doesn’t distract from what is broadly a thoroughly enjoyable collection of songs.
Critical Thinking is still very much a barnstorming Manics album, a state-of-the-nation address that will have many tuning in and nodding along.