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Old 13-01-2019, 13:55
Marat Sar's Avatar
Marat Sar Marat Sar is offline
I am purity, they call me perverted
 
Join Date: Sep 2006
Posts: 493
Wonderful, wonderful thread. I'm sorry I don't have time to contribute properly. Due to the inhuman neoliberal crunch-machine I'm in professionally. But short and dirty version: I didn't like them when Truth came out. In Eastern Europe we'd missed EMG. It just didn't reach there. Truth was the first Manics album to penetrate all of Europe. I didn't have anything against them, when they did -- Tolerate was a nice, slightly boring track playing on MTV.

I now consider it, like, in my top 5 songs ever written. And the best single ever released, so yeah... In my defense, I was like 12. A friend of mine was already into them. He told me they have tremendous album titles: Everything Must Go, This Is My Truth... The Holy Bible. I absolutely agreed. They sounded very cool.

As I became a full-blown teenage delinquent loser and semi-homeless person (in the early aughts), Tolerate found its way on to mine and my friends' hit list, playing in the background. Just, you know, like Billy Idol's Sweet 16 or something. A golden oldie that was on winamp playlists at parties. We all really got into it slowly and started discussing what an amazing song it is. What an incredible opening line and so on. A bit of wikipedia told us what it's about and the admiration grew.

In the meanwhile, they'd also released Know Your Enemy, another very cool title, I thought. I was in love for the first time and Found That Soul -- playing on the radio in Easter-Europe-Land -- went well with that emotion. They'd really pierced the radio playlist by them: Ocean Spray, So Why So Sad, even There By The Grace of God were all in circulation and formed a nice background radiation for that time period. But still only in that "Muse is playing, Muse is an okay band though a whole album of that, I don't know..." kind of way.

The premier of "THe Love Or Richard Nixon" on Nordic MTV was the point where I and a lot of my friends immediately became a fans. We just looked at that on MTV and said: "wow." What a tremendously atmospheric and elegiac joke. These people are fucking high-concept. I was blown away at the audacity, the historicity, all of it. Lifeblood made me into a huge fan. Of the albums before it, Truth was the biggest rediscovery. With fresh eyes all those songs that had seemed boring were suddenly gigantic. The opening 5 tracks, I still think, are the most overbearingly grandiose cycle of music I've ever heard. If not the best then definitley the BIGGEST. I also ended up moving to England. The manics hit really hard here, in situ. Especially stuff like Nobody Loved You...

Sorry for lousy editing on this post, as I said -- I don't have time to chisel the prose .

Have a nice Sunday y'all.
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