Engage With Your Shadow (WTF?!)

[UEF]

This is one of those numbers that makes me disbelieve the "we've never done drugs" line. The whole song sounds like a stoned-out jam. They must've been baked.

[SeanOfTheDead]

The intro reminds me of that recorded version of Evidently Chickentown.

[Suicide Aldi]

I love EWYS. I hope the new album is full of stuff like this.

[Dac X Lee]

Originally Posted by Suicide Aldi

I love EWYS. I hope the new album is full of stuff like this.

You wish.
I like that song too, but judging from the songs we've been provided so far, it doesn't look like it will be "full of songs like this" on Futurology. Unless literally ALL of the rest of the album we haven't heard has such songs. Which quite unlikely.

[Automatik]

Ah, EGWYS. You know what it is by how it makes you feel.

Actually the music is brilliant; and if James had done the vocals, it'd have been fantastic, rather than fantastically notorious.

[everlasting]

Ha, I played this just yesterday for a laugh, my girlfriend said it was appalling but then straight after I kept playing it and we were doing silly dances to it all day and quoting the crappy lyrics all the time. UNLOCKING YOUR TRUE POTENTIAL! Thanks for the laughs Nicky! The guitar parts are fine, I reckon Nicky nicked a rough demo or something, put on a sluggish drum track and talked crap over the top when he was drunk one day and slapped it on the b-sides

[Automatik]

The guitar parts are actually very good throughout - very I Killed The Zeitgeist (in the best sense). There's a nice über-Nicky Krautrock feel to the song; overall it just feels unfinished.

I wonder if James will ever be daring enough to try an acoustic version for a live show or a radio appearance?

(Stranger things have happened.)

[Automatik]

Does anyone know when Engage With Your Shadow was actually recorded?

Following on from the Lifeblood winter thread I looked again at the track listings for the Lifeblood singles. There's a very clear CD1 (1 b-side), CD2 (3 b-sides) and DVD (2 b-sides) pattern.

Now, I have always assumed that Cardiff Afterlife was to released as the third single from Lifeblood - which almost matches, incidentally, the number of 'unreleased' tracks that made their way onto the Japanese bonus and God Save The Manics giveaway, except the DVD would be one track short, viz.

CD1
1. Cardiff Afterlife
2. The Soulmates

CD2
1. Cardiff Afterlife
2. Antarctic
3. A Secret Society
4. Firefight

DVD
1. Cardiff Afterlife
2. Picturesque (video)
3. ???

Given that Failure Bound was created from No Jubilees for the Empty Souls DVD, could it be that Engage With Your Shadow - which is to me at least just as conspicuously, er, 'experimental' - is in fact the missing Lifeblood DVD b-side?

And before anyone says Engage With Your Shadow is from 2011, Midnight Sun, from the same single release, was originally from the KYE sessions.

Was Engage Your Shadow shelved, like Midnight Sun, only to be dug out when the PFAYM b-sides needed bolstering?