When an important band loses its ability to set the cultural agenda, its only option is to fall back on its ability to write great music. But the Manic Street Preachers’ songbook — expressed so powerfully on Everything Must Go (1996) — had been completely mislaid by the time Lifeblood was released in 2004, confirming the impression that they were a spent force.

The inevitable solo excursions — James Dean Bradfield’s enjoyably frothy The Great Western (2006) and Nicky Wire’s typically nihilistic I Killed the Zeitgeist (2006) — suggested that the band were heading in different creative directions. Instead, the process seems to have helped them to rediscover their appetite for writing big rock anthems because the new album Send Away The Tigers is their most righteous guitar record since Gold Against the Soul (2002).

Clocking in at a lean 38 minutes, its ten tracks reverberate with thunderous Les Paul power chords and spiralling solos from Bradfield — and sound all the better for it. Naturally, being the Manics, the polemical agenda is present and politically correct in Wire’s lyrics, but the songs emerge largely unscathed from his wordy rhetoric. Not least of these, Your Love Alone is Not Enough, a duet with Nina Persson of the Cardigans — the finest female rock vocalist since Chrissie Hynde — represents their best single since If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next. Elsewhere, Indian Summer and I’m Just a Patsy, with their string sections and V8 choruses, would fit well on a meatier Everything Must Go. The title track, meanwhile, captures the essence of the Manics, an evocative lyric and a soaring tune built on a great descending riff.

Less successful is Autumnsong, which finds Bradfield rewriting Guns N’ Roses’ Sweet Child O’ Mine, a reminder that the band once announced their intention to release their own Appetite for Destruction and disappear. At once it reveals the only flaw in Send Away The Tigers — it is the sound of a band desperately trying to reconnect with their younger selves but sounding like a middle-aged man on a Harley. And yet you can’t deny that both machines still make a great noise.

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