Manic Street Preachers "you can draw some pretty obvious conclusions from the lyrics." Wire, who admitted finding the task of editing this song "pretty choking", eventually composed the music and sang lead vocals after Bradfield found himself unsuited to the task. Bradfield commented that "Journal for Plague Lovers" was an attempt to finally secure the legacy of their former member Richey Edwards and the result was that, during the recording process, it was as close to feeling his presence since his disappearance: "There was a sense of responsibility to do his words justice. That was part of the whole thing of letting enough
Everything Must Go (Manic Street Preachers album) a hummable ditty." "Vox" magazine's Mark Sutherland saw "Everything Must Go" as the group's "most approachable" album, describing it as a "record so superb it might just make intelligence fashionable again", and surmising that the album "proves that, professionally, at least, the Manic Street Preachers don't miss Richey." "Rolling Stone" critic David Fricke called "Everything Must Go" the "most underrated album of the year", describing it as "a record of painstaking melodic craft and thundering execution, a proclamation of physical and emotional cleansing – up to a point." In a retrospective review, Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic wrote: "Above all,