Welsh rock band Manic Street Preachers are back, and after an album that didn't perform particularly well sales and chart-wise, they seem to be after a hit this time. The lead single from Postcards From A Young Man, is called (It's Not War) Just The End Of Love, and after loving their last commercial lead single in 2007 - Your Love Alone Is Not Enough, which featured Cardigans' singer Nina Persson, I was intrigued to see how they're intending to bag a hit in an era where rock music is performing terribly in the charts. In fact it has a practically non-existent presence these days save for the odd Facebook campaign boosted entry, like Rage Against The Machine. A far cry from five years ago when the likes of Arctic Monkeys, Kaiser Chiefs and Franz Ferdinand were powerful chart forces.
It would seem that the Manics answer to this, with their new single, is to jump back ten years in time and use an incredibly similar main hook to Steps' 2000 #1 hit Stomp!!! It may have been a UK #1 but everyone knows it was far from their best and got to the top by default on a low sales week. Why not borrow from classics such as One For Sorrow or It's The Way You Make Me Feel!?! It's a catchy song, and I actually do like it, but it's a very strange experience listening to it indeed. Can the Manics buck the trend to score a rare rock hit or is the genre too irrelevant chart-wise for this to make a mark at the moment? Time will tell...but for now, 'everybody clap your hands *clap clap* get on up and dance, we're gonna stomp all night now!';
Manic Street Preachers - (It's Not War) Just The End Of Love
Steps - Stomp
I take it you haven't heard this before?
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZwWtM9wByk
I'll try not to generalise, so let's say 90% of Steps songs were either covers, or the closest you could get to being covers without actually being the same song.