Forever unreconciled, more like.
For starters, this is one of the few Greatest Hits you'll hear this year in which the new tracks are the band's breathtaking high water mark. 'There By The Grace Of God', along with wistful little brother 'Door To The River', is a chilly, poignant, Depeche Mode-haunted stunner whose ability to be coherently about something whilst successfully shoehorning the words into something like an elegant musical close fit (instead of a logorrheic car crash) makes it practically the Platonic ideal of what the Manics probably always aimed at. But rarely accomplished all at the same time.
Which isn't, of course, the only reason 'Forever Delayed' is a satisfying, frequently heartrending prຜof everything - the bullesye hits, the pastiched misses, the reach-exceeding-grasp determination -that makes this uniquely conflicted band as odd and glorious a duck as ever took to amplifiers. You may not find any answers as to why four Welshman ended up being, simultaneously, posterblokes for the lad-rock contingent and spokesmen for the eyeliner-and-body-dysmorphia brigade (if not for the politicos, who remain sniffy despite the fact that it was the Manics, not Billy Bragg, who calmly smuggled "if I can shoot rabbits/then I can shoot fascists" and then a roaring, nauseous, kickass 'The Masses Against The Classes' onto TOTP, and for that alone should be loved senseless). Nope, you may not find answers, but you'll find plenty of examples.
And oh, the contradictions. Oh, the clunky, rock-wannabe clutching-at-chords ('You Love Us'). Oh, the leather-lunged bluster ('From Despair To Where', a lumbering 'Design For Life' and horridly shouty 'Faster'). But oh, the pop thrillz (inevitably, 'Motorcycle Emptiness', ropey solo n' all, and a furious, baby-faced 'Motown Junk'). And oh, the paradoxically hopeful melancholy, too ('There By The Grace Of God', 'Suicide Is Painless', and 'The Everlasting', with its gorgeously heart-crushed"in the beginning/when we were winning…").
And sure, you could hardly shoot rabbits in a barrel as easy as poke fun at the words, words, words. Sometimes brilliant. Sometimes incomprehensible. Sometimes, as with the whoopingly popful Traci Lords duet 'Little Baby Nothing', just desperately, well-intentionedly duff. And all the more peculiar for being sung by James Bradfield, a man tailor-made for arena rock but valiantly trying to squeeze in Nicky Wire's extravagances, generation terrorism and all sorts, against the clock. ('If You Tolerate This…, for instance, scans like a fiendish experiment conducted by mad scientists standing over goggle-eyed volunteers with huge, Oxford Concise-laden spoons.)
And more power to 'em, in a world where the Manics' peers confine Grand Ambitions to chart placings. Best-ofs are nearly always comfy, depressing proof of what the marketing industry likes to call the Brand Proposition: find that lowest common denominator and stick to it like a goddamned dray horse in blinkers. This might not be the glitter-glued situationist punch in the face of the world that Richey Manic dreamed of, but so many years after he went wherever he went, the Manics still make a determinedly fine fist of it.
