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Originally Posted by VCK
Like people have said there's an album in there somewhere - Found That Soul and Intravenous Agnostic are both brilliant and, controversial as this may be, but Wattsville Blues and Miss Europa Disco Dancer are two of the better songs on it. The problem is, there's no cohesive flow to it. Half the songs just seem lazily written and I've never been quite sure what they were setting out to achieve when they wrote the album. Were they wanting to do something a bit more raw than TIMTTMY and EMG, were they wanting to still do something poppy, or were they wanting to just do what they want and subvert people's expectations of them?
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The band said around the time that they wanted to do something deliberately imperfect, and return to their punk roots. This was a reaction to the gloss of EMG and TIMT. But they later admitted that led to a form of self sabotage. When the producers and others asked them to keep going to improve an idea on the record, they'd push back and keep it as it was. So in a way they were quite bloody mounded about the rawness, and arguably they achieved what they set out to do. It also meant that it was difficult to pull a cohesive album out of the rubble so to speak.
Quote:
Originally Posted by VCK
It's really odd how their career took quite a nosedive when this album came out, when Oasis have put out some albums that were even more critically panned and the general consenus was that they too were past their best at the turn of the millennium, yet they were still headlining festivals and selling out arenas and stadiums towards the end of their tenure. The Manics went from headlining Glastonbury to accepting support slots at festivals within the space of a few years.
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To me this is all about relative size once a band gets big.
The Manics enjoyed huge success, and arguably filled the void left by Oasis in 1998 and 1999. They did seem to be the guitar band of that moment. That said, not long before that in 1996, MSP were playing theatres. Oasis were already playing football stadiums.
Oasis also had the benefit of coasting on the fumes of the first 2 albums which, in many ways, still eclipse the flaws of their later work to this day. The Manics never had that fuel to coast on, since their breakthrough came later. And though the public undeniably took to EMG and TIMT, they were still never quite as universally liked as the first few Oasis records. I think you could see that in the way that the EMG tour sold really well in comparison to the other anniversary events.
So when their relative stars began to wane, they waned from different points. Compared to Oasis, the Manics were in many ways half way up the mountain. So even though the Manics fell down a peg from 2001 onward, the fact that they still gained good mainstream coverage for a good while shows the level of their work ethic, and that almost none of their successes has fallen in their lap. And on that note, fair play to them for plugging away when it would have been much easier to play the hiatus card.