1) A Design for Life; 2) Motorcycle Emptiness; 3) If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next; 4) La Tristesse Durera (Scream to a Sigh); 5) There By the Grace of God; 6) You Love Us; 7) Australia; 8) You Stole the Sun from My Heart; 9) Kevin Carter; 10) Tsunami; 11) The Masses Against the Classes; 12) From Despair to Where; 13) Door to the River; 14) Everything Must Go; 15) Faster; 16) Little Baby Nothing; 17) Suicide Is Painless (Theme from MASH); 18) So Why So Sad; 19) The Everlasting; 20) Motown Junk
The post career derail hits compilation!
Key tracks: I mean it's a hits compilation so technically everything, but "There By the Grace of God" and "Door to the River" deserve to be highlighted.
After the intentional brake-pull that the Manics caused with the less commercially instant Know Your Enemy, the clear follow-up move is... obviously a greatest hits compilation, for the label to get some cash in while the band's name is still somewhat relevant.
Summing up six albums within 80 minutes isn't a particularly easy task, especially given how varied the Manics' career had already been by this point - even if you limit yourself to just the singles. Forever Delayed mostly takes the predictable route and does pretty well with it all things considered. All the singles from Everything Must Go and This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours are here obviously, and they're accompanied by all the obvious favourites you'd expect to find here. The non-album singles "Suicide Is Painless", "Motown Junk" and "The Masses Against the Classes" have been included which is great both from a completionist point of view as well as convenient for fans. The fan and critic favourite The Holy Bible is represented by a single song in "Faster", which looks outrageous at first glance until you realise that trying to pretend the other singles from that album would fit within a hit compilation would constitute as an unbelievable act of self-delusion (and trying to squeeze in "Faster" alone with the rest of these songs stylistically was an impossible mission to start with, and it's really abrupt when it does appear). The exclusion of "Stay Beautiful" raises an eyebrow given how iconic it is, but admittedly the other Generation Terrorists cuts have an even more valid reason to be included. The only actual baffling matter is choosing "So Why So Sad" to be the only album to represent Know Your Enemy: I can get why only song would be taken from that record, but you have "Ocean Spray" right there to pick, i.e. the one thing close to a hit single and the one song the band regularly continue to play from the album live to this day.
But without the nitpicking, it does what a greatest hits collection should do: provide a snappy overview of the big successes and accompanying back catalogue colleagues to make for a good listen, and you could do a far worse of a job than this to entice you to explore the back catalogue further. The edits included here are downright painful in some cases ("Motorcycle Emptiness" being particularly egregious), but the songs themselves are fantastic and even if not fully representative of the band's first decade, they're a great snapshot.
That includes the token two new songs, because both "There By the Grace of God" and "Door to the River" are more than justified to be here. They are transitional songs, included here as a taste of things to come as the band would explore a more keyboard-driven, intricately produced direction up next, and so sound-wise they're something completely new rather than retreading past glories. But they're phenomenal teasers and rival many of the actual hit songs on this very record. The ethereal "There By the Grace of God" is one of the band's most subtly gorgeous, atmospheric songs, while "Door to the River" is overtly so: the former a haunting anthem that sounds resigned to an unknown bittersweet fate, the latter a grand string-laden tearjerker of a ballad with one of Wire's most poignant lyrics. They're masterful, far far away from the sort of throwaways that the mandatory new songs on hit compilations are associated with. If anything, it's a crime they're confined here because they really should have headed an album of their own.
Really, the only thing that holds this record back - besides the fact that it's a greatest hits compilation and not an actual album - is that it's outdated; not just because in the streaming era the idea of a single-disc career summation is a quaint antiquity, but because Manics themselves released another compilation later down the line which features all but one of the songs from here. The only reason I'm grading it an 8 instead of a 9 or even a 10 that it would deserve from an objective point of view is that I've never really formed any kind of relationship with this one: I was already way into the Manics rabbit hole by the time this was released and the edits kept me away from listening to this when I could just listen to the actual albums. It's an utilitarian rating. My copy is also the bog standard version. I would recommend any other completionist fan to dig a little deeper and find the deluxe 2-CD version which includes most of the remixes that had been scattered across the band's singles as b-sides in the prior decade, which does include some particularly good versions amongst the chaff.
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