Sony Music UK
2004
Lifeblood
About This Album
Instead of being the return to form it was clearly intended to be, Manic Street Preachers' sixth album, Know Your Enemy, sucked the life out of the band, collapsing in a heap of bad reviews and ill will. It was such a wrong move that even the band acknowledged that things went wrong, so they took some time off to regroup, issuing a hits collection Forever Delayed in 2002, with a B-sides and rarities comp Lipstick Traces following in 2003. The decks being suitably cleared, the band eased back in late 2004 with their seventh album Lifeblood, a record that takes the MOR/AOR inclinations of This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours to heart. Gliding by on smooth surfaces of synthesizers and lightly sequenced beats, Lifeblood is simpler and hookier than the lumbering Know Your Enemy, which is a relative blessing: it results in a record that's easier to enjoy, even if its smoothness doesn't gloss over memories of what the jagged, visceral band the Manics used to be. Even on the grandiose, arena-ready Everything Must Go, they sounded like a tense bundle of nerve and ambition, a clear byproduct of punk, but here they sound not far removed from the legions of po-faced, sincere but dull groups that stumbled through the colorless aftermath of Britpop at the tail-end of the '90s.
Track List (try tracks 1,5,8 and 10)

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