Forever Delayed: The Greatest Hits

Amazon Review

It's been a long, hard career for the Manic Street Preachers, from busking in Cardiff to losing a guitarist (Richey Edwards) and winning awards; but somehow the band survived. Forever Delayed is the long-overdue collection of their best songs, spanning the course of their turbulent career. This was always going to be a weak collection--not because of any shortcomings in their singles material, but because they've always been about something bigger than mere singles. They produced not so much concept albums, but albums of concept, presented as completed works of art. As such, removing any songs from their original context is to immediately weaken them.

It shows their career progr...  Read full review »

Bleak, yet uplifting

As another reviewer rightly states, this is not a Greatest Hits package that a Manics devotee would necessarily give their approval too. Bands with such back catalogues are doomed to disappoint someone when they finally succoumb to the cop-out that allows them to release an "album" without actually having to be creative.

Having said that, a singles collection from one of Britain's most popular bands of the last 20 years is very welcome in my house.
There is a theme running through the majority of CDs I've bought in the last 5 years or so. During my student years I was (a) a Blur AND Oasis fan and (b) skint. So I bought Parklife and Definitely Maybe and so on, without being able to afford the "...  Read full review »

Excellent music.. but an illthought, and unrepresentative collection

This band used to mean EVERYTHING.

They used to want to turn Buckingham Palace into rubble. They wanted to destroy rock'n'roll. They could change people lives. They opened people's horizons. They brought people into a world where Marxism and Marilyn Monroe could exist with Guns'N'Roses and Che Guevara

These days they're just another rock band. One with a bassist whose still living in 1992. One who've all settled down into domestic bliss. Generation Gap Terrorists. A band that broke every fundamental rule of their ideology : marriages, love songs, children, and drugs.

"Every agent defects. Every artist sells out" - William Burroughs.

Like everyone else in the world, The Manics are hypocrites and liars.

And now they want you to buy their latest CD. A hasty, incomplete compilation of their old singles, thrown together without any consideration for order, style, or taste

There's no way to track any form of artistic progression in this CD. Songs are picked up at random from the back catalogue and thrown back down in any order. Any fool with a CD-Writer can make a compilation this bad.

The penultimate two tracks say it all for me.

"The Everlasting" - a dull, sentimental piece of stadium rock balladry, is followed by "Motown Junk" : definitively the best record of the Manics career. To chart the Manics downward spiral so obviously is cruel. But a lyric that runs "I don't believe in it anymore / pathetic acts for a worthless cause" and sounds like bad Pink Floyd just shows how far...  Read full review »

The Concise Manic Street Preachers

Forever Delayed is OK. It essentially compiles the Manics' most accessible singles but its trump card is that a quarter of the twenty songs have never previously been available on any album. I don't have a problem with the tracklisting. There's a time a place for everything, and the place for The Intense Humming Of Evil isn't on a Greatest Hits. I also think that the 'radio anthem' side of the Manics isn't celebrated enough, and it's telling that their most cherished song Motorcycle Emptiness feels totally at home snuggled up to You Stole The Sun From My Heart and Australia.
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They've always been a singles band anyway!

It should come as no surprise to those who've followed the manics over the years that they should bring out a 'best of' eventually. i disagree with the statements that they're doing a disservice to their legacy by putting this together, since i personally think even the first 2 albums contained alot of filler, and were best served by the singles they released from them. in actual fact, the only album of theirs i think is a whole work of 'art' meant to be listened to as an entire piece is 'the holy bible,' unsurprisingly the album least covered here. so m...  Read full review »

Not what it could or should have been.....

OK, granted this compilation does feature some of the band's greatest tracks. Aside from the pure lyrical intelligence on display, I replay many of these tracks over and over for the fantastic guitar work of James Dean Bradfield. If ever there was an underrated guitist of his generation,then it would be JDB. Tracks such as You Love Us, La Tristesse Durera,Motorcycle Emptiness have some absolutely dazzling guitar work. However, this in turn leads me to the first of two major criticisms:
Firstly, many guitar highlights of these songs are not even on this record for seveal tracks have been edited (butchered) so other less deserving tracks could fit. The ending of You Love Us is completely absent ( apersonal air-guitar favour...  Read full review »