What choo talkin' 'bout, Wire?

[Flint]

TLORN is just perfect in every single way outside the fact that it was the lead single, which was pretty much the worst decision you could do with the album. The atmosphere of it is fantastically ice-cold emotionless which goes great with the lyrics, the soundworld of it is immaculate (especially that high-pitch synth line in the chorus <3), and then you have that infectious groove to it. It's just such a superb song.

And yeah, Lifeblood era b-sides are some of their best. Wouldn't say they're far superior to the album itself (I think my stance on LB is pretty well established by now) but they're not far from it - and perhaps if they wanted an apocalyptic disco song on the album TLORN could have been replaced with Everyone Knows/Nobody Cares, but the former's not damaging the album in any way. The majority of them would have made brilliant album tracks. Generally the 98-05 period was pretty much their b-side golden age with nary a miss amongst all the glimmering diamonds.

Now if people would only stop talking about my two favourite Manics subjects (Lifeblood and b-sides) while I'm asleep so I don't have to go through pages of text and then desperately try to answer whichever points that were mentioned eons ago while feeling wake-up groggy .