Know Your Enemy is actually my favorite Manic Street Preachers (MSO) album after The Holy Bible. I don’t quite understand why it’s hated. Well, okay; I know what the criticisms are:

1. It’s different from their work from Everything Must Go and onward to this point. Why is that a bad thing? Those albums were different from what the band was doing before too, and one of my favorite things about MSP is that each of their albums sound a bit different. As far as I’m concerned, the more different they are the better. If I want smooth, slow guitar pop I can put on This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours any time I want and feel satisfied. If I want a more lo-fi almost indie rock-ish album with eclectic songwriting, there’s no other album in the MSP library other than Know Your Enemy. There’s no point in a band being redundant and repeating themselves, you’d just be getting the same music over and over.

2. It’s stylistically inconsistent. Again, I consider this a good thing. The production and sound of the instruments doesn’t change throughout the album so it doesn’t lose cohesiveness from this, and instead just gains more variety that the band sometimes lacked before and could make their albums seem a bit repetitive. “Miss Europa Disco Dancer” is an excellent disco-influenced indie pop song with a glorious harp riff thrown in that predated the same style of a lot of synth-based indie pop music that would eventually become popular by several years. This album is seriously ahead of time in the way it sounds considering it came out in 2001. I also think the song quality is consistent as hell, and if it weren’t for some inflexible MSP fans saying otherwise, a lot of these songs would be heralded as great if they were on another band’s album.

3. No Richey Edwards. Yeah, he’s great, but get over it. I dunno.

I’m glad Manic Street Preachers got their rock edge and punk philosophies back, as it allowed them to expand a little, something their music desperately needed after consciously trying to be so listener friendly that it followed a predictable format. Things were getting stale, and that’s the one thing this album isn’t from beginning to end. The band would never rock out this hard again, though they would go on to create more good albums.