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Old 28-03-2016, 20:10
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Europa Gluten Free Europa Gluten Free is offline
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Join Date: Nov 2006
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Porco View Post
I've said similar before, but I think Know Your Enemy is a funny(~strange) album, in that I think there's a really good normal length album in it with a few tracks it could have lost, it's just that almost everyone disagrees which tracks those should have been...!

Some random KYE opinions/memories/thoughts:

• Personally I love the lyrics of Intravenous Agnostic almost as much as the music, which is a lot (and that others find them so poor baffles me slightly, but horses for courses and all that). For me that track is like the beating heart of the whole album. And "What a mess" is possibly still my favourite Wire interjection in any of their songs, summing up both the song and album for both good and bad perfectly IMHO.

• Still can't get on with Watsville Blues, which remains one of my least favourite Manics songs.

• Why they didn't include The Masses Against The Classes on the standard UK album still baffles me. It would have fitted tonally, KYE was hardly the most coherent conceptual piece anyway, and the song was a promotion-friendly no.1 hit single... And maybe I've answered my own question and they were so intent in doing a complete 180-turn on the commercial success of TIMTTMY they didn't want to include a already-established hit. Still, amongst the more crazy things they have done IMHO.

• I still have the IA/doom-laden thunderclouds .swf off the KYE-era website saved somewhere, and while it's still quite cool the last time I looked at it it had dated quite a bit, so my advice is don't seek it out, just remember it in your mind as the cool thing it was back then and don't spoil it for yourself in the context of the present.

• Without outright disliking them I don't really get on that well with The Year of Purification or Royal Correspondent. I feel like the former is to R.E.M. what Autumnsong later became to Guns 'N Roses - an (IMHO) unsuccessful pastiche that for me lacked much of the emotional impact, or 'Manics rush' of most of their songs - it just sounded like them acting as another band to me. RC I just find a bit dull and whingey and I have grown to hate the line about food being chewed to a degree I can find no rational reasoning to express.

• I like So Why So Sad, but I love Found That Soul, and I think they would have been better off only releasing the latter as the first single.

• I know us lot often say this, but for me this is THE album/era where some of the B-sides were better than some of the album tracks and I would have happily swapped them. Locust Valley and Fear of Motion especially, but I also have soft spots for Groundhog Days and Masking Tape, and as we heard much later, Midnight Sun. Not so much Pedestal though, that was a slightly p-p-p-preposterous song (though ok as a B-side).

• I love Ocean Spray, Let Robeson Sing, Dead Martyrs, His Last Painting, Baby Elian, Freedom of Speech Won't Feed My Children.

• I like My Guernica, The Convelscent and Epicentre. I quite enjoy Miss Europa Disco Dancer but don't really like the repeated braindead muddyfunsters bit at the end, it's like they couldn't leave it as a daft fun straight tune, they had to self-sabotage it, which is so them, and part of why I love them in general, just not here specifically.

• For all its mess, the production on KYE is always more pleasant to listen to, when I do, than I remember it being later. I type this as I am listening to it!

• I was still living at the top a tall building with a big bedroom when KYE came out and so I could play along on my guitar extremely loudly without anyone complaining, which was nice. Happy days.

• More than anything, the original release of KYE and its singles reminds me of getting the bus to uni, listening to them on my Minidisc player. Looking back, Minidisc seems like the most appropriate format for the album in some ways, loved by those who loved it but never really made it totally mainstream like what came before or after...

• I also remember around this time period I had a mini-altercation with someone trying to hand out flyers for a club/event or similar that was (mis-)using the infamous Richey '4 real' photo. People trying to force junk mail into your hands is annoying at the best of times, but the use of the Richey image for so something so vaccuous particularly riled me, and I let the person know, loudly and in no uncertain terms as I swerved the attempt to push the unwanted flyer into my hands regardless. There's your braindead muddyfunsters Wire, maybe you were right all along after all!

Wrote more than I thought I would there.
Best post I've read on this forum for a long long time.
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