Manic Street Preachers Destructive Alienating Cultural and Despair Filled Tracks POLL RESULTS

So… Faster, Design, Tristesse, Kevin Carter, Motorcycle, Yes, Masses, This Is Yesterday, Repeat, From Despair to Where? I always forget something when I guess poll top 10s.

If 4st 7lbs also places, that would be every track from The Holy Bible bar Intense Humming of Evil, which even the Manics admit is a bit hard to take. Apparently they played it live just once, and people were running away.

ugh kevin carter. almost as bad as the everlasting

You crazy. One of Richey's best lyrics, punk-funk verses and a Sean trumpet solo. Tense and elegaic at the same time.

I thought 4st 7lbs had placed already, but no. It's a cert.

My guess for the top ten (in order): Faster, Motorcycle, Design, Yes, Despair, Yesterday, Carter, Sleepflower, Masses, Repeat. No Tristesse, no Australia, no Intense Humming.

So much of a cert that I forgot it in the same post! Scratch Masses, it's out - 4st 7 is in at #6.

'kevin carter' is one of the real standouts on EMG (which i used to think was perfect but which now i find a little hard-going in the middle, every single song sounding like it's trying to be a tear-jerking anthem) for me, one of their most compact and perfect songs.

apparently james insisted that richey and nicky rewrite 'intense humming' as the first draft sounded too 'ambiguous' to him. definitely not a subject you want to have ppl debating what you mean by, a la 'pcp' or 'archives of evil.'

i feel pretty silly that i neglected to vote in this poll as relistening to all these albums over the past week reminded me that MSP are still, at least some of the time, my favorite band.

maybe patrick bateman will be a suprise #1 with new art riot at #2

I voted for intense humming, it's an amazing piece of work.

♪♫ Ah-ha'm goin' down / to Suicide Alley ♪♫

i guess my top 10 would've been:

1. yes
2. faster
3. PCP
4. 4st 7lb
5. baby elian
6. sculpture of man
7. this is yesterday
8. no surface all feeling
9. motown junk
10. die in the summertime

'patrick bateman' is so terrible. if i'm bitter at the manics at all it's probably for getting 18-year-old me to read that shitty book.

I felt obliged to spread my top 20 across a few albums to give other songs a chance, otherwise it would have been half Holy Bible.

much prefer the heavenly version of 'you love us.'

― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Tuesday, June 28, 2011 2:35 PM (50 minutes ago) Bookmark

know nothing about this band, hadn't much liked what little i'd heard in the past, but i'm following this thread in an attempt to get an education. turns out they're pretty great! can't really get into the holy bible tracks, but "motown junk" is good and "stay beautiful" is damn near great. love the relative softness of "if you tolerate this..." and "further away" and "little baby nothing" (cultural alienation, boredom and despair).

plus yeah, the heavenly version is way better.

two massive songs to finish on there. fucking mental that you love us isn't top 5. i thought it was an outside contender for #1. what has become of this world? almost enough to make you wanna jump off a bridge. i am assuming that all of the votes were lumped together and that clowns like me who specified the heavenly version didn't kill it with vote splitting? i had it second but i was sad i couldn't have two #1s. GT version sounds a little empty without the background nonsense and obv the iggy pop at the end of the heavenly version is awesome.

motown junk i didn't know about till after GT - maybe after GATS. i was given it on a mixtape and it blew my mind twice over, once because it is so fucking great, and twice because someone had scratched into the shelter at my bus stop "we live in urban hell we destroy rock n roll" and i had read that nearly every week for a year or more and all of a sudden jdb said it out of my sony sports walkman. we are well beyond new art riot territory i guess. bummer.

t looks like the number of #1s isn't being included with each entry - is that right? it would be cool to see that after.

I still grin like a shitty 15-year-old every time I hear "I laughed when Lennon got shot!"

now i'm not a teenager, patrick bateman does indeed sound really terrible

musically its great. You finishing the countdown today?

yep

10. La Tristessa Durera (Scream to a Sigh) (from Gold Against The Soul) [8 votes, 170 points, 1993] tied with 9

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJzwIFyZfck

Their morbid baggy record. Great Chemical Brothers remix of this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GX1WcbT-2h0

Was the lowest of the GATS tracks on my ballot, it occurs to me now I got things completely backwards.

9. Sleepflower (from Gold Against The Soul) [7 votes, 170 points, 1993] tied with 10

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGYnEtqU8u8

yes!

^!

Oh good. GATS always feels like the forgotten Manics album, but it has by far the catchiest riffs.

very underrated album.

EMG was the first Manics album not to have a naked torso on the cover. Was this a thing?

Repeat over Tristessa was a bad call, but I'd like to point out that other than that my top ten has been 100% accurate so far.

Sleepflower's brilliant, obviously. The best riff!

8. From Despair to Where (from Gold Against The Soul) [9 votes, 189 points, 1993]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7JTXZMfDq0

Had I voted, "Tristesse" would've been my #1.

Listening now, I've just realised I don't like the strings on Despair. They should've had a big, overloaded guitar solo instead. It seems the kind of obvious move, actually, I wonder why they didn't?

7. This Is Yesterday (from The Holy Bible) [7 votes, 1 first place, 202 points, 1994]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpcEsL-vs1w

love This Is Yesterday...

That's my first-place. It's not the first top pick to show, is it?!

three other tracks have had them so far

So they have. Three Two (relative) obscurities, too.

This Is Yesterday is grand, except for the rather pedestrian drumming.

6. 4st 7lb (from The Holy Bible) [9 votes, 1 first place, 244 points, 1994]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qy2ebaAGMU0

Best song that begins "Days since I last pissed"...

nah it's fantastic tho, my #3. I definitely prefer Richie when he's empathising with the lost and damned, than when he's in pure polemical mdoe.

Richey, wth

Great to see Sleepflower get so high! I'm a little surprised to see This is Yesterday in the top 10 too, great track as it is.

Since the Manics, how many other British bands can we name whose lyrics were actually about concrete reified concepts, if you see what I mean? Something I think I took for granted about the band at the time are the issues being addressed here - some of the ideas here are misguided, but well intentioned and intelligent. I can't think of many more recent commercially viable acts who've achieved anything similar.

Not sure there's been anyone like them before or since, in terms of how deeply they burrow into such matters. I was going to say 'politics', but that feels like a very inadequate description of what they were doing.

I was thinking about the sheer hostility they provoked when they arrived, and how contempt for going in for 'concepts' was so much part of that. I hope the h8ers enjoyed the years of Noelisms that followed.

5. Kevin Carter (from Everything Must Go) [9 votes, 1 first place, 252 points, 1996]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLDr0QNCUd4

RIPeat (and Masses Against The Classes)

Again, I can't bring myself to like Kevin Carter because it's nearly the same as The Trickster by Radiohead.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBHRiKZY2fk

have loved both songs for years and never made the connection. can't say it bothers me much now the connection has been made...

cool to see sleepflower break the top ten. that and from despair definitely rise above the flaws that keep the rest of the album down. this is yesterday is a good but unspectacular track, surprised to find it so high. 4st 7 i just couldn't vote for, not for any lack of appreciation, but taken out of the context of the album and looking thru a 'top trax' lens, it's too much. kevin carter is good, the EMG track that nearly made it on for me, but 5 is kinda lol. does that mean australia is still to come? oh dear.

Trickster / KC don't sound that similar now I listen to them side by side, but still, very similar tempo/chord progression.