Preachers Deliver Their Message

For the Manic Street Preachers’ Troubadour performance on Tuesday, bassist Nicky Wire cut a comely figure in some blue eye-shadow and a gaudy thrift-store dress. It wasn’t about gender-bending, but more like a homage to the band’s early ‘90s incarnation as glam-pop social critics dead set on offending every institution they could think of.

The Welsh band has gone through enormous changes since then, most significantly the disappearance and presumed death of guitarist Richey James in 1995, and it shed its glam image long ago in favor of a more workmanlike facade.

Manic Street Preachers may share politics and polemical thrust with their British punk forebears, but they dress everything up in sunny melodies that put them squarely in the Brit-pop camp. Singer and guitarist James Dean Bradfield drew from a large vocabulary of styles, echoing the frisky new wave riffs of Blondie one moment, stamping out power chords the next, then delving into slippery leads that sounded like Roxy Music’s Phil Manzanera.

Regardless of the style, the band rarely downshifted into anything resembling a mid-tempo song, and that steady momentum suited the manic crowd just fine. There was much waving of arms and participatory lip-syncing among audience members--requisite behavior for cultists who place the Preachers in the same Brit-pop pantheon as Blur and Oasis.