It is surprising that any band would ‘top load’ an album with singles nowadays, especially as physical singles are all but defunct (record companies used to think they had to put the songs they’d released on 45’s towards the start of the album).
Now bands can put any track up on streaming to represent what they want to showcase for an album before it’s fully released.
This makes me think that the Manics just thought these were the 4 strongest songs, & they happened to fit best at that point on the album.
Even on RIF we got HMLAH which is track 8.
The only other theory that sprung to mind (without listening to CT yet), is that the tracklisting might ‘dissolve’ as it went along. In much the way that TIMTTMY slowly, slowly starts to fade
