100 favourite songs: #98: "Faster" - Manic Street Preachers

Time was when I was a lot angrier than I am nowadays, but I liked a good anthem just as much then as I do now, which may go some way to explaining why, after all these years, The Holy Bible still stands up so well for me. It was the Manics’ last with Richey James on board, and their one true masterpiece, and I think that it must be the angriest and the blackest album that I’ve ever heard; there was a time, brief but stormy, when it was pretty much all I listened to, slouching around uni or at home, and even now, I can perfectly understand how it gained that hold on me.

Really, the whole album is basically the same thing over and over — grinding riffs, sneering, ragged vocals, lines that don’t scan and are all the better for it, one magnificent call to arms after another — and the quality of its songs is consistently high, but two in particular have always stood out: “Ifwhiteamerica…” and “Faster”. The former is distinguished by having the most compulsive verse/chorus/bridge on the album, and being one of the most immediately memorable and obviously tuneful. “Faster”, by contrast, is in many ways a relatively weak song, but it has two things going for it, along with all the other virtues of The Holy Bible as a whole, which make it a favourite of mine: the raging, spiralling, stabbing blast of its opening salvo and first verse, and the three seconds of sheer bile and genius conjoined in which JDB throws out all notions of scansion and simply spits out the words “I know I believe in nothing but it is my nothing”. Utterly undeniable.