Released on 30 august 1994, "The Holy Bible" was the third studio album by Welsh indire rock band Manic Street Preachers, while the album was being written and recorded, lyricist and rhythm guitarist Richey Edwards was struggling with severe depression, alcohol abuse, self-harm and anorexia nervosa, and its contents are considered by many sources to reflect his mental state.
Indeed the songs focus on themes relating to politics and human suffering. It was published six months before the mysterious Edward's disappearance on 1 Februay 1995, near the Severn bridge in his native Wales. The album reached No. 6 in the UK initially, global sales were disappointing compared to previous albums and the record did not chart in mainland Europe or North America. In the years to come, the album received widespread acclaim from critics and has sold over half million copies worldwide.
The lyrics was split fairly evenly between Richey Edwards and Nicky Wire, 70-75% written by Edwards, according to James Dean Bradfield. The album's lyrics deal with subjects including prostitution, American consumerism, British imperialism, freedom of speech, the Holocaust, self-starvation, serial killers, the death penalty, political revolution, childhood, fascism and suicide.
"Mausoleum" and "The Intense Humming of Evil", Wire said, were both inspired by visits by the band to former concentration camps at Dachau and Belsen. "Die in the Summertime" and "4st 7lb" were "pretty obviously about Richey's state of mind".However, Edwards attested that the former song is actually about a pensioner wanting to die with memories of childhood in his mind. "This Is Yesterday", according to Wire, is "about how people always look back to their youth and look on it as a glorious period". "She Is Suffering", Wire saying it suffers from "man-coming-to-the-rescue syndrome".According to Edwards, the "she" in the song title is desire: "In other Bibles and Holy Books no truth is possible until you empty yourself of desire".
Musically, The Holy Bible marks a shift from the modern rock sound of their first two albums, into a more oriented alternative rock, post-punk, hard rock, punck rock, gothic rock and glam punk
Despite not charting in mainland Europe, and not selling very well initially, The Holy Bible received widespread acclaim from music critics upon release. the album isn't elegant, but it is bloody effective". which regarded the album as primarily the work of Richey Edwards, described it as "the sound of a group in extremis. Although the music itself isn't as scarily intense, its tight, terse hard rock and glam hooks accentuate the paranoia behind the songs, making the lyrics cut deeper, this marks the album as one of the best albums of the 90s—ignored by many, but loved intensely by the few who've lived with it over the years.
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