And so Mansun's epitaph is written: "Nobody cares when you're gone." But no, dear Mansun, we do care-- why else, in the year 2006, would we spare a moment (or 500 words) to consider a band that's been defunct for four years and barely registered even as a Britpop footnote on these shores? Maybe it's that Mansun's lavish rendering of razor-on-wrist solipsism with conceptual bombast seems oddly prescient to the current emo/prog crossover, or maybe it's just the void created by three years without a new Radiohead record. Whatever the reason, it feels like a fortuitous time to reassess another UK band from the 1990s that broke free of Britpop's straitjacket conformity to pursue their own dystopian vision, even if Mogwai ridiculed them for it.
Mansun's 1997 debut The Attack of the Grey Lantern emerged right before Oasis' champagne supernovas flamed out into Coldplayed complacency. It entered the UK charts at number one, but it's quite possible the band's limited sales in America were comprised mostly of confused mall goths who thought they were purchasing Marilyn's latest. Of course, Mansun weren't paying lip service to Charlie as much as the Verve, whose 1992 single "A Man Called Sun" allegedly gave the band its name, and whose swirling, rhythmic psychedelia reverberates through still-powerful early signatures like "Wide Open Space" and "The Chad Who Loved Me". "Taxloss" seems to encapsulate Mansun's opposition and adherence to Britpop tropes, taking the Beatles' "Taxman" as its source text while cranking up the cynicism and psych-funk groove, but with just enough reverence for the original to show they weren't totally taking the piss.
But even Grey Lantern's widescreen vantage provided scant preparation for 1998's Six, a Kid A-sized curveball where Mansun essentially turned into the Britpop Mars Volta, compacting infinite, incongruous song fragments into eight-minute suites that were exhilarating and exhausting in equal measure. But its unwieldy material is ill-served by Legacy's non-chronological sequence. Aside from stand-alone single "Legacy" (a glistening anti-love song that should've become Mansun's "Wonderwall"), Six is mostly represented by awkward abbreviations: the Arthur Baker single mix of "Six" excises the track's manic middle section and instead piles on distracting backing vocals and drum machine fills, making the song's mantra of "life is a compromise anyway" seem especially ironic. The single edit of "Being a Girl" retains its hyperactive opening tract-- perhaps to emphasize that Mansun were doing new-wavoid power-pop six years before Franz Ferdinand-- but the song feels slight without its gorgeously glacial Eno-esque closing act.
It could be the non-linear tracklist is supposed to create the same feeling of randomness as Mansun's records, or maybe the band just want to put material from 2000's undercooked Little Kix (Legacy opens with that album's prophetic "I Can Only Disappoint You") and the band's aborted fourth album on equal footing with their more lauded early work. Even so, the rather rote click-track rock of "Getting Your Way" and "Slipping Away" suggest the band was probably wise to call it a day. Mansun newcomers would be better served, however, by a straightforward reading of the catalog that would allow them to make better sense of the band's ambitions and evolutions, instead of having a string of Six tracks interrupted by the band's 1996 debut single, "Take It Easy Chicken", a baggy flashback that's aged about as well as Shaun Ryder. But even with these dated digressions, Legacy offers up enough convincing evidence that Mansun's pomp can endure under different circumstances.
