Breaking the trend of 2 year breaks between releases, Manic Moonlight arrived just a scant year after 2000's excellent Please Come Home... Mr. Bulbous and would prove to be the last disc of original material King's would drop until 2005's Ogre Tones. With such a short break between the two records a degree of similarity could be expected, and Manic Moonlight is much more in the vein of Please Come Home... than their later output, acting almost as a companion piece to the former album.
The main difference is felt in the instrumentation: stripped down bass and guitar lines and a novel use of electronic drum looping gives the tracks a more experimental, alt-rock quality ("Yeah", "Static") that wasn't such an emphasized aspect of their sound until now, and Please Come Home... to an extent. The King's X mark can still be felt on groovier highlights like "Skeptical Winds" and "Vegetable" but the name of the game here is comfortable tinkering with the more laid-back sound they'd been exploring with Please Come Home..., and mostly they succeed in creating pleasant little compositions - the only true clunkers on display are the title track and "Yeah", but the level consistency is high on Manic Moonlight mainly because you know what you're in for right from opener "Believe", for better or for worse.
None of these tracks are too long to be really grating per se, but the extended lengths of "Skeptical Winds", "Jenna", and "The Other Side", coupled with the contractually-obliged 10th song "Water Ceremony" suggest a band running on less than a full tank of gas creatively. Speculation aside, I've always thought of Manic Moonlight as the least essential King's X record - if you skip this one than you aren't missing much, especially if you aren't a fan of Please Come Home.... It's competent and definitely has it's moments, but a seminal moment it is not.
C-
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