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Yeah, KYE sounds like a band who aren't sure what to do. It's not your typical "White Album" type record, which is all over the place but sounds like a fascinating scrapbook; instead, it feels a bit impotent, as the rawer stuff is underplayed by the bigger production values of some songs, and the stranger moments are underplayed by the more simple tracks.
In hindsight, something like RTF/Futurology might have been a better strategy for them at the time: release a relatively poppy record with some of the weirder touches they'd been playing with - So Why So Sad, Year of Purification, Miss Europa Disco Dancer, The Convalescent, etc. - followed a year or so later by a raw rock album
Instead, what they managed was following up their first number one album with a period of five years in which one fairly jumbled album was released, followed by an underwhelming best of which, in itself, was fairly confusing for the fans (proposed and scrapped single releases of Forever Delayed and the Motorcycle Emptiness re-recording); then following that up with an album that a lot of fans hated because it was so far from the Manics they were used to, yet was too late to keep ahold of the mainstream fanbase EMG and TIMTTMY got them.
So yeah, obviously an era where they were unsure of what they were doing. It's a shame, because there are a lot of brilliant songs on KYE, and Lifeblood is a tremendous album for what it is, but they're sadly tainted from the band's perspective. I'm the same with my own music: some stuff I've recorded I can't listen to because it was made during a time of personal and/or artistic difficulty.
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19-06-2017, 18:23
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