Listening for the first time now... wow, SKON sounds even better without the horrible radio compression... loving it.

I've only listened to the intros of each song, because I still want Monday to be the first time I hear the album in full. However, I wanted to get a taste for it, just to check that I'm right to be selling one of my tickets. I have now confirmed two things to myself:

1) If I listened to it in full just now, there's a good chance the CD will never be taken out of the casing, as I may never want to listen to this album a second time

2) I might want to consider selling both my tickets

I know they've made music harking back to EMG before (Indian Summer being made to the ADFL template being an obvious example), but this is taking the piss. Really, this sounds like a Manics pastiche, but by one of those bands that tries to copy their EMG sound and come out with something hideous, rather than the ones that try to copy their THB or GT sound, but at least produce something you can have a good laugh at.

Strings should be banned from all future Manics releases.

Of course, I might be wrong, and perhaps JDB has made the interesting decision to make the intros the worst part of the songs, rather than the best part.

Some of the intros are really good but they don't tend to signify the rest of the songs. Hold on to those tickets.

personally i think it breaks any rule in the book of good music. it's just awful. kieslowski pretty much said it all.

'"Everything Must Go" getting quite a hard time here. I think it was a good album, and "design for life" is a good song. I thought "There is nothing left to lose" was a better album, especially the tracks that weren't singles....my little empire, be natural etc...'

Haha, isn't that a Foo Fighters album?

The dude ain't wrong - and to think I rather liked Hazelton Avenue for its melody. That's another for the Wiki guy to add to the credits.

Why don't they just cut to the chase and become a covers band? Elton is much better at writing songs for those awesome melodies than JDB is.

I have to wait, my LP may come saturday, i have to wait

Good stuff, i finally get to listen to it properly. I really thought the previews were terrible so here goes...two tracks in and it's not offensive. I actually quite like Postcards for a Young Man, and of course the single. Still think Some Kind of Nothingness is a shite AutumnSong clone though.

I'm starting to get really tired of all these opinions, finding it hard to look forward to the album at this point... :( Wish everyone just heard it at the same point in time again!

Difference between this and KYE is that this time they tried too hard to please the listening public whereas on KYE didn't give a shit...and came out with some brilliant songs.

Such a stupid policy nowadays imho. Stream the entire album so people end up circulating dodgy webrips as "leaks" in low quality.

Oh boy, I've found another bunch of really boring and sad comments in this joyous thread. :scared: ... I guess it's true: 21.12.2012 = the end of the world!

P.S.: It's a good album.