Postcards From A Young Man Thread

[Marat Sar]

Postcards is so unsexy, it somehow manages to make the concept of it being a day today unsexy. The bare "dayness" of it... the mind-numbing daytimenessness - not only in the strings production or the god-awful guitars, but in it's very essence.

SKON was a good idea and I can sometimes salvage that idea, when I am experiencing the wreck of it's reality - the unnecessary dueting, the gospel choir.

Those arpeggios in INWJTEOL do have a trace of exhuberance about them.

I somehow appear to be able to actually enjoy most of Golden Platitudes, until the guitar crunching begins. I can even handle the first crunching... episode?.... because I know it will end, and then I will get some more actual song. (Crunching is not song. How it doesn't ruin Ocean Spray is a miracle). But the second crunching is beyond hope and only leads to more crunching.

The Future Has Been Here 4 Ever should be a much better song, but isn't, because it should be sexy - what with the the bouncy horns and the low sung nicky vocal - but can't, because it's on "pfaym!" - an abbreviation so adept at encapsulating the essence and sound of pfaym... pfayem... pfayyyyeyeynmmm....

Hazelton Avenue, I think I Found It and All We Make Is Entertainment are the moments where the Manics could do with teenage sons or daugthers the most. So they could thell their dads they have Hughesovkas and Next Jets To Moscow in them still and should be doing those instead of pfaymming around.

We're pfaymming....
hope you like pfaymming too,
we're pfaymmingwe'repfaymmingwe'repfaymming...

Now, let us take an even closer look at The P.F.A.Y.M. At le pfayemme...
1) Without the "y", the simple "PFAM!" sounds like a softer, failed version of PAM! Like the gunshot PAM! but with blanks. Like electric guitars, but with the way they sound on All We Make Is Entertainment.
2) Yet the "y" adds so much! PFAYEM... It's that grotesque, almost Cartmanlike effect... like they know how shitty it is, but are doing it anyway. Which, if I remember correctly, was the original concept behind PFAYM. We could be making great music right now. We could be making stuff like Red Rubber. We could easily be working on RTF and Futurology already, but we are so obsessed with failure, we won't! Instead, we'll pfaym for a year, and then we'll pfaym some more with National Treasures! Then we'll take a two-year pfaym.

The most insulting part of the whole PFAYM affair is that they already did it four ears ealier. They called it SATT then, and it was bad, but not as bad, because it wasn't happening again.