CD1: 1) Send Away the Tigers; 2) Welcome to the Dead Zone; 3) Your Love Alone Is Not Enough; 4) Indian Summer; 5) The Second Great Depression; 6) Rendition; 7) Autumnsong; 8) I'm Just a Patsy; 9) Imperial Bodybags; 10) Winterlovers; 11) Working Class Hero; Bonus tracks: 12) Send Away the Tigers (Faster Studios Demo); 13) Underdogs (Faster Studios Demo); 14) Your Love Alone Is Not Enough (Demo - 60's Jangle); 15) Indian Summer (Cassette Home Acoustic Demo); 16) The Second Great Depression (Faster Studios Demo); 17) Rendition (Cassette Home Acoustic Demo); 18) Autumnsong (Faster Studios Demo); 19) I'm Just a Patsy (Cassette Home Acoustic Demo); 20) Imperial Bodybags (Faster Studios Demo); 21) Winterlovers (Faster Studios Demo)
CD2: 1) Leviathan; 2) Umbrella; 3) Ghost of Christmas; 4) Boxes & Lists; 5) Love Letter to the Future; 6) Little Girl Lost; 7) Fearless Punk Ballad; 8) Your Love Alone Is Not Enough (Nina Solo Acoustic); 9) Red Sleeping Beauty; 10) The Long Goodbye; 11) Morning Comrades; 12) 1404; 15) The Vorticists; 16) Autumnsong (Acoustic Version); 17) Anorexic Rodin; 18) Heyday of the Blood; 19) Lady Lazarus; 20) You Know It's Going to Hurt
B-side manna for the collectors, but they retrospectively mess up the actual album even more than during the original release.
Key tracks: Of the bonus material, "Welcome to the Dead Zone", "Boxes & Lists", "Anorexic Rodin"
(this is a review of the 10th anniversary reissue of Send Away the Tigers. For the actual album review, please click here).
In case anyone’s keeping tally, the Manic Street Preachers reissue series has been... erratic in its schedule. Rather than sticking to a chronological order, the band’s deluxe re-releases have followed a somewhat more random pattern, finding an anniversary year as and when it suits them. There is some logic to it: the critical favourite The Holy Bible got its turn first, then the popular classic Everything Must Go. Rather than make the logical and chronological step to re-release the international hit This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours next, the more cult-favoured debut Generation Terrorists got its turn first - but then, it’s also the one Manics album that actually needed a genuine remaster. Everyone was expecting This Is My Truth to get its due next but suffice to say it was a bit of a whiplash when out of nowhere, the 10th anniversary edition of Send Away the Tigers got announced.
Which speaks a lot about the band’s opinion on the album’s importance to them. Following a couple of intentionally less crowd-pleasing records, Send Away the Tigers was their first taste of mainstream success in several years and gave them their last genuine hit with “Your Love Alone Is Not Enough”. It did spawn a new generation of fans and the band consider it a motivational booster, but I don’t think anyone was clamouring for a celebratory reissue for it over some of the historic albums. And that’s without the personal bias, i.e. that Send Away the Tigers was more or less the band’s nadir and giving it the big box treatment over the actually great records is akin to putting makeup on a pig and trying to prop it up as your hot new date.
Which brings us to the most controversial aspect of this reissue. One of the bigger flaws of Send Away the Tigers is the obvious laziness that’s all over the record, from songwriting to production. “Underdogs”, the album’s unofficial lead single, became the poster boy for this at the time of its release: intended as a tribute to the fans, the fanbase was less than thrilled to have a hackneyed old man punk cut directed at them, calling them freaks, dodgily insisting that “people like you need to fuck people like me” and having a copy/paste edit so bad it became infamous. And so, on the tenth anniversary reissue, it’s just gone. Off the track list. There’s no mention of it in the liner notes and the promo material made little to no mention of its absence, like it had never existed. It has been replaced by the b-side “Welcome to the Dead Zone” and had they made an argument that ‘this is how the album was originally intended’ it may have flied, but “Underdogs” isn’t even included in the bonus material. A demo of it exists in the original’s place in the demo section of the record, and that’s it.
I’m not a big fan of “Underdogs” either, but there’s still something awkward about tampering with the tracklist of the original record to this extent. You can understand why the band would want to pretend it doesn’t exist, but it’s replaced one disingenuous problem on the album with another. It doesn’t help that, true to the album, even the switch-up has been lazy. “Welcome to the Dead Zone” is a great song and actually one of the best songs of this entire era, a starry-eyed mid-tempo anthem with a glimmer in its eyes and more heart than most songs on the album itself - but it’s not track 2. Swapping the songs one-to-one has been the easy way out but the album basically grinds to a halt right off the start because the flow is so, so bad now - a shining example of why sequencing does matter. So not only is there the problem that the reissue effectively blocks you from listening to the album as it was actually released, but the substitute version that’s given is too clunky to work as a listening experience as well.
At least the bonus material is good. The obligatory album demos offer little of interest beyond the mysterious “Underdogs” suddenly making an appearance (for what it’s worth, it sounds identical to the original version, just a little scruffier and without the edit blunder), and are mostly either slightly less produced versions of the album takes or James’ acoustic versions. The only item of major interest is the “60’s jangle” version of “Your Love Alone Is Not Enough” which actually works well as an alternative version of the song and in some ways, is more interesting than the album version. The real treat is the second disc, which gathers together b-sides and non-album material from this period. Even though I'm lukewarm about the album, the single bonus tracks for this period somehow managed to keep up with the band's usual standards in most parts and you could have made a much, much stronger album if some of these had been included. Of particular interest are "Boxes & Lists" which does the whole 'back to rock' shtick of the main album with actual conviction, the impassionate and almost angrily wistful "Anorexic Rodin", the atmospheric acoustic piece "Morning Comrades" and the "Disarm"-esque bombast of "Fearless Punk Ballad". The two instrumentals "The Vorticists" and "You Know It's Going to Hurt" showcase the band's growing fascination with wordless songs and how much their treatment of such has changed, the former coming in with some particularly jaunty angular guitars and the latter acting almost like a try-out at post rock. There's also the novelties of the band's cover of Rihanna's "Umbrella" (actually rather good and excellently Manics-ified) and their suitably cheesy Christmas song "Ghost of Christmas" (now a regular jaunt in my Christmas playlists), and the charity compilation cut "Leviathan" which dates a few years before the actual record but which signalled the return to guitars, and which has the stems of a really good song but which ends way too quickly.
Elsewhere, there’s also a DVD that features interviews, music videos, performances, behind the scenes footage and the other usual material, as well as the band’s 2007 Glastonbury show. I had somewhat tuned out of the band around this time and none of the live footage from this period particularly excites me as a result, but in terms of amount of material it’s a solid offering. The packaging has changed from the thick boxes of the previous reissues to a thin book format that's akin to the standard deluxe versions they've been releasing alongside their later studio albums, and the larger format is mainly used to present the original lyric sheets in the liner notes - as per usual, the new liner notes place more emphasis on visuals than any text beyond the obligatory introduction essay. It’s not as flashy as the previous re-releases just because it’s so like the band’s normal deluxe releases but that’s not really a criticism per se (apart from how this began the band’s decision to change the physical format for the reissues each time, ensuring none of them fit next to each other in one’s shelf) and in terms of bonus material, this is exactly what I personally seek out from a reissue - i.e. b-sides, accompanying additional studio material and if possible, some demos (even if they're not that interesting here). Which means that I do actually rate this a few notches higher than the original release - and why wouldn't I, because so much of the additional studio material beats what's on the album? The album itself is in a worse shape than ever ironically enough thanks to the sudden tracklist twists, but given it never needed a remaster to begin with, it ends up being almost like an afterthought on its own anniversary release. This is a completionist's dream for b-sides and so disc 2 will be a great addition to any Manics collection. Or your self-made digital rip compilation which throws away the superfluous acoustic versions (literally just the original album vocal and guitar tracks but with most other layers muted) and adds in "Welcome to the Dead Zone". Send Away the Tigers isn’t an album I particularly enjoy and I’m one of the people who think this was perhaps an unnecessary release at its point in time, but beyond that this is nonetheless a really good reissue.
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