Lifeblood #10

[Mr Richey]

I remember being very disappointed with the album when I picked it up on release day. I was already baffled by the single, "The Love Of Richard Nixon", which came across as a joke. It quickly became an album I owned but never listened to.

Reappraising it now, it's not a good album. There are some songs on there that I like and many of the b-sides from that era are actually quite excellent, but it's just not a Manics album. That was always my biggest gripe. But hey, they tried something different, it didn't really work for me and that's just how it goes sometimes. I see Futurology as being a more creatively successful version of Lifeblood in so much as it still feels like the Manics whilst being very different to anything they've done before.

But with all of that being said...I'm probably the only person on FD who actually likes "Fragments".