No Longer a Lost Cause: The Critical Discography Will Resume

This site has been dormant for a long time – since April 2015, to be more specific. Not for the first time, I’d become overwhelmed by the sheer size of the Manics’ discography. In all honesty, there was also a period during which I’d almost fallen out of love with the band.

Over the years, I’ve had a number of emails and comments asking if the site would come back. I’ve also noticed that, incredibly, it has been viewed almost 250,000 times since it was set up; in 2018, it had its second most successful year ever despite there being no new posts at all. Only part of this is explained by the release of Resistance is Futile last April – there’s so much interest in Manic Street Preachers.

Partly for these reasons, and partly because that old love has come back strongly, I decided in that odd liminal space between Christmas and New Year to resume working on the Critical Discography. Beginning later today (with [A186] ‘Underdogs’) new posts will begin to go up – daily, where possible.

You won’t notice many changes from the old format, with the exception that I don’t expect to pay attention to music videos. They feel outside the site’s remit, and they’re only a YouTube search away. I also suspect I will include less of my own personal judgements on the songs, and focus on trying to understand them better – listeners can form their own opinions without my help.

The only major new development is that while the site will always be free, I have set up a Patreon page for those readers who would like to support this project financially. Were you to throw a few coins my way, it would definitely help focus my mind on this task – “rebellion, it always sells at a profit”, after all.

Thank you so much for reading and commenting on the site for all this time – I hope you’ll read along for the long haul, however long it may be.

Stay beautiful.