Manic Street Preachers - "Your Love Alone Is Not Enough" / Arctic Monkeys - "Brianstorm"

UPDATE: Both MP3s are now of the official album versions, rather than their radio rip counterparts.

Wow, and I thought the music industry was moving a bit slowly around now. In the past 72 hours or so I've got my grubby paws on brand new radio rips of not one, but two future hit singles which could each very viably be referred to as the comeback of the year if it weren't for the other. The first of these, and the one I'm giving the slight edge to right now, is "Your Love Alone Is Not Enough" (Which had better be the title; I've seen literally hundreds of variations ranging from the acceptable "Your Love Is Not Enough" to the confusing "You Live Alone"), featuring guest vocals from Nina Persson of The Cardigans, and even a couple of lines from everyone's favourite lovable bassist/lyricist Nicky Wire. The song probably bears the most similarity to Everything Must Go in terms of music, probably the album with the least experimentation on show, and which sounds like a band who've all of a sudden fallen in love with pop songwriting, perhaps leading to the sense of joy which they certainly exude on "Your Love Alone...". Forthcoming ninth studio album Send Away The Tigers will, it seems, incorporate this style to a bigger extent, as well as revisiting their earlier days; Nicky says one song sounds like "All out punk metal - Alice Cooper - Stooges guitar outro. Could have been on Generation Terrorist.". Which sounds pretty great, if you ask me.

[MP3] Manic Street Preachers - Your Love Alone Is Not Enough

And on to the next enormous comeback single, Arctic Monkeys' "Brianstorm". Yeah, that's "Brianstorm", not "Brainstorm", which is sure to cause utter havoc on last.fm charts, and indeed in my fragile little mind. But, interesting and irritating as the title is, the track itself boats both of those qualities in much higher quantities; it would seem that after not quite managing to upstage them at Reading, they're actually trying to be that night's headliners, the one and only Muse. From the opening guitar sound which might just be the definition of the word 'frenetic', to the epic thrash-out of an ending, both of which could fit seamlessly into one of Showbiz's heavier numbers. But other than those parts which'll surely set the moshpits on fire on their next tour, the lyrics and especially Alex Turner's vocals are Arctics through and through; the likes of "Calm, collected and commanding, you hit the other story standing, with your ambitions and jokes, I bet there's hundreds of blokes that have wept 'cos you've stolen their... Thunder!" is as, er, poetic as any other sample from Whatever People Say I Am.

[MP3] Arctic Monkeys - Brianstorm