Classic Rock attacks Lifeblood !!!!!

[Aestivate]

OK, I posted this list somewhere else but here is the Classic Rock magazine buyer's guide with some quotes and the full reason for their hatred of Lifeblood.

Essential – Classics

Everything Must Go - “...this fourth album is the band’s most bullet-proof batch of songs”

Generation Terrorists – “...a small-town record with its eye on the world; a rock n roll thesis that fused literary heavyweights and LA hair metal with the fury of being young, skint and marked as Valleys factory fodder.”

Superior – Reputation Cementing

The Holy Bible – “The official critical line is that The Holy Bible is their grand work, and the hard-core will piss blood to see it dismissed as merely “superior”. But for the Manics dabbler it is a divisive first purchase, with the savage brilliance of cuts like Faster and She Is Suffering offset by a general bleakness that isn’t for everyone.”

Gold Against The Soul – “From Despair To Where, Life Becoming A Landslide, La Tristesse Durera... a band that caries these songs before it is invincible”.

Send Away The Tigers – “For the first time in years the band sounded like they were having fun again, revisiting the glam metal of their youth on Underdogs and scoring a #2 with Your Love Alone is Not Enough”

Postcards From A Young Man – “... the closest the Manics have come to a street party”

Good – Worth Exploring

Know Your Enemy – “This schizophrenic sixth album is frustrating, home to several absolute crackers (Intravenous Agnostic), some wet weekend balladry (So Why So Sad) and – God help us – one moment of hellish calypso funk.”

Journal For Plague Lovers - “...the unsettling sleeve art, absence of hit singles, and sharp edges of moments like Peeled Apples made this the most raw and thrusting Manics album in years.”

This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours – “...too patchy to be considered a true classic, with the lumbering S.Y.M.M. and Wire’s My Little Empire as tedious as you’d expect from a song written about hovering.”


Avoid

Lifeblood

“It’s not like we had rows or anything,” Wire mused of Lifeblood’s half-arsed recording process. “It’s just we had a theory that we must sound like New Order or Pet Shop Boys”

Contrary to the title, this was anemic: a huge, wafty, water-treading record that reaches for ‘epic’ but defies even the most die-hard fan to recall a single memorable hook, barbed lyric or reason for listening. It’s no surprise that Lifeblood dropped like a stone from the UK chart, that both Bradfield and Wire would dip into solo projects afterwards, or that 2007’s Send Away The Tigers felt like an embarrassed apology.

Bloody awful