There's a slight over kill with the strings and choirs but I love lush strings more often than not.

starting to really enjoy The Descent now.

Choir is especially overblown on the future is here forever, postcards ending and platitudes (why colonize the moon sounds awful!). Its a shame cos they are all good songs which are slightly spoiled

Strings work well on some songs (Descent particularly) but two high in the mix on others (SKON) I want to hear guitars!

I 100% agree with that!

Just wanted to add that I love the album. Really think it could end up in my top 3 fave Manics album ever after HB and EMB. Yeah its purposely commercial but the Manics do it so well whilst still retaining their integrity.

Well I don't think they overdid either - if they are going to do it they might as well go for it full pelt for me! And Golden Platitudes especially benefits from this in my view, it all adds to the emotion of the track.

I played my wife SKON the other day, and as someone who is only moderately interested in music she thinks that the strings and choir really lift it.

I'm still unsure how i feel about the album,it contains some of my favourite manic songs and in ways i didn't think they had it in them to make great music again in this style.

Golden platitudes
Hazelton avenue

both great

I love the strings and choirs (apart from one female, the blonde one I presume, trying to outsing everybody! :lol:). Yeah, shame about the chart position but hopefully it will stick around for a bit.

This is the worst Manics album by a long way. It's all so boring and bland.

In funny sort of way, maybe the three of them are all rather content with their lives at the moment, so the album lacks the spark of the previous two i.e. SATT (the reaction against Lifeblood) and JFPL (the need to do justice to Richey's lyrics).

I hope the tour features plenty of JFPL, otherwise it's going to be a long night next Saturday.

judging by past peformance it'll feature a lot of postcards and various past hits... unlucky :p

True!

Like this post.

Listening to the demos. All sound pretty decent apart from skon (singing usually means singing different notes Mr Wire) and Platuitudes demo just sounds a mess.

As for the album itself, its gone down a bit in my estimation. I don't think it will stand up to repeated playing. A fun album with quite a few enjoyable melodies, but that's about it really. And I agree with another reviewer who said that the mixture of glossy pop numbers with the rock sounding numbers (balconies, auto into, dont be evil) doesn't really work. They'd have been better focusing on one or the other. It's an enjoyable album, and better than 90% of other stuff released this year, but it's arguably their most superficial album.

Yep, agree with both the "lazy" qoute and also the view, if they were going to take the "strings" approach, get in a a producer who has suceeded in the past.

Well on the GMTV replacement 'DAYBREAK' Phil Colins beating the Manics is one of the '5 important news breaks' of the day:)