This Welsh rock trio follows their most commercially successful album, 1998's This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours, with an infinitely more adventurous collection.

In stores Tuesday, Know Your Enemy zips along over the course of 16 tracks -- that's saying something right there -- that brim with the Preachers' earlier intensity and various rock, punk, folk, pop, new wave and disco influences, particularly Joy Division and New Order.

The Preachers immediately find their footing with the rollicking opening anthem, Found That Soul, and keep that energy up on such punk-new wave numbers as Intravenous Agnostic, Dead Martyrs, My Guernica and The Convalescent, not to mention folkier pop tunes like Let Robeson Sing, His Last Painting, Royal Correspondent and Epicentre.

They lose their way slightly with the ABBA-like pop of So Why So Sad and the outright dancefloor number Miss Europa Disco Dancer, ironic though it may be, given its repetitive last words: "Brain-dead motherf---ers, Brain-dead motherf---ers ..."

The Preachers debuted their new songs recently in Havana, becoming the first Western band to play in Cuba, and you've got to wonder how Baby Elian, a folk-meets-new wave tune about embattled Cuban tot Elian Gonzalez, went over.

Meanwhile, singer-guitarist James Dean Bradfield contributes his first lyrics on the autobiographical Ocean Spray, a song about his mother's 1999 death from cancer.

Bassist-lyricist Nicky Wire also sings lead vocals for the first time on the lo-fi folk-pop tune, Wattsville Blues, a response to a sneering tabloid headline about the state of his home in Wattsville, South Wales.

Sunday, March 25, 2001

Singing the praises of Preachers