manics for the band ask!
First song I heard by them: the first Anything by the manics i ever listened to was forever delayed (picked up a cd copy locally because i heard Of them but knew fuck shit otherwise), so it must have been a design for life. i remember listening to the whole comp album and not really vibing with it. little did i know a few years later that cd would carry me through The Three Months Where I Brought My Discman Everywhere toward the end of last year
Favorite album: journal for plague lovers. i wrote quite the ramble about it in the tags of this post some months back but fuckkkkk is it a good album. it's working with an verbose, information-dense lyrical style that they hadn't worked with much in over a decade and the degree to which the band has grown technically and sonically in the intervening period creates work not quite like their other albums and ends up kind of being a dialogue between those two periods of time (see tags on that post). also the fact that it not only uses exclusively lyrics richey had left to them but also the fact that it was recorded the same year he was declared presumed dead sort of makes me feel like those two things are symbolically inseparable. like a way of sort of... working out feelings they held on to until that point. the manics have kept finding new and creative ways to express grief over the past thirty years and it punches me in the chest every time. and that every time includes william's last words transitioning into silence transitioning into the opening line of bag lady.
5 favorite songs: ok. keep in mind that when i write this list i have only listened to around half of their discography because i keep getting stuck on the same albums over and over again. so this list may be subject to change with time. i am also omitting tracks from the holy bible because even if on an objective level it is some of their best work, it is hard to look at that album as Not an hour-long punch in the gut (and i feel like my feelings on each of the songs on that album play into my reads of other tracks on it so that's kind of hard to tease apart. maybe i will write something about the album someday though).
anyway, right now my list is*:
marlon J.D.
life becoming a landslide
bag lady
born a girl
nobody loved you
*(kept trying to come up with an order for these and kept swapping them around a bunch because ultimately the order just depends on the moment)
