It is the definition of “cultdom”to have your fanbase petition your record company to release the incomplete sessions from your final album a year after the band split (Kleptomania is the result of around 2000 signatures). But then Chester space-rockers Mansun were always the epitome of outsider kitsch.
Essentially just backing tracks and guide vocals, Kleptomania is remarkably coherent: a return to the ornate rockadelia of their debut Attack Of The Grey Lantern with a smattering of the eclectic ‘song segments’which made their Radiohead-inspiring 1999 masterpiece Six so baffling to critics and public alike.
Blurred at the edges and packaged with two CDs of demos and B-sides, it’s one for the stalker set, but still a proud epitaph to a band too inventive to live.