This is the day your life will surely change
National Treasures was a perfunctory release: cash in on the legacy, round off the hits for public consumption and symbolically wave goodbye to their time as hitmakers after Postcards from a Young Man failed to make a splash, setting the stage for the band to take a break and wonder what to do next. It was a compilation that rested entirely on the laurels of a long and fruitful career, and so the token new song was seemingly approached with the attitude that no one was ever going to pay attention to it anyway. I.e., they chucked in a quick cover.
The The‘s “This Is the Day” is so befitting to end a career-spanning compilation that it feels like a cliché from the start, given it’s a song about looking back and reflecting on your past. Of course it’s not quite as simple as that – there’s an undertone of troubles that shade the narrator’s past and the titular day is the moment of reflection when you vow to make the changes you need in your life – but the actual meaning is lost in the easy underlining of the most context-appropriate parts. All the focus is on the chorus, and furthermore the Manics’ version and its big Bradfieldian strings and joyful guitar walls removes all of the hinted bittersweetness in the muted synth pop arrangement of the original. Any ambiguity in the original has been done away with in the name of a grand anthem to cap off a hits collection.
As far as Manics’ covers go this isn’t actually anywhere near the bottom of the pack. Whilst the arrangement has become a very stereotypically Manics-like, it’s a big shift from the original and I do appreciate artists covering songs distinctly through their own filter (I do also love the little preset drum machine which opens the song so innocently). It also makes sense perfect sense as a Manics song of that caliber and James performs it like it was their own to begin with, with gusto and resonance. In comparison to many of their other covers you can hear the effort put into this one, and at least you can’t entirely dismiss this as a lazy this’ll-do throwaway. But you can’t shake off the feeling that this is nothing more than a token gesture recorded out of necessity rather than desire; certainly if you compare it to the last hits compilation single “There By the Grace of God” which saw the band looking forward to the next chapter, rather than squint at the recent past. Even the arrangement is all very Send Away the Tigers / Postcards from a Young Man as if to sate only the hunger of the people who’d buy the compilation while only knowing the recent hits and maybe “A Design for Life”. And if you want some tangential proof of whether this meant much for the band, just take a look at their other covers which had been released in prominent places or as singles and how they still rotate those on tour, while this disappeared as soon as the National Treasures gigs (the best thing to come out of this era, by the way, and it’s a crime a real live album was never released out of them) ended – even their version of “Umbrella” has had random revisits along the years. “This Is the Day” is a thoroughly functional release, but nothing more than a faint footnote in the Manics’ singles discography.
The single was only released digitally and as a HMV-exclusive promotional CD, and this marks the end of the band’s long-standing tradition of single sleeve quotes. The official video does start off with a quote from J.G. Ballard though (“Memory is the greatest gallery in the world and I can play an endless archive of images”), which leads onto – to absolutely no one’s surprise – a clip show of past videos and DVD footage.
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