This album, the band's full-length debut (they had an EP prior to this, contained within the bonus tracks), sounds little like the material that would later bring the band its greatest successes (apart from the vocals, of course, which are exactly the same here as they would be later). Similarities abound in their sound relative to other major burgeoning acts of the day (the ones that come to mind for me most strongly are Elvis Costello and The Cars, but there are other snippets of other bands in there as well); this isn't to say that there are stylistic cribbings going on either way, of course, but rather the band was drawing from the same creative springs as the others. The band's primary distinction at this point wasn't its general sound, but rather its hyperactivity; the band's songs (mostly written by Partridge, with Moulding only contributing "Cross Wires," "Do What You Do" and "I'll Set Myself on Fire") sound like they were written by somebody on a triple hit of espresso, and this is both a good thing and a bad thing. It's a good thing because the songs are full of interesting ideas that show the band jumping out of its skin to make its songs entertaining and striking as often as possible; on the other hand, it's a bad thing because the band has a tendency at this point to overload its songs with ideas of such bizarre intensity that they somewhat undermine the effectiveness of each other. My reaction to a typical song on this album is to enjoy any given 30-second stretch of it a great deal, but to enjoy the song as a whole somewhat less, and this extends to my feelings for the album on the whole.

Oddly, it ends up that two of the songs with the most exaggerated ideas are probably my favorites of the album, but that's life I suppose. The opening "Radios in Motion" is a pretty conventional punk-ish number at its core (punkish guitars and bass in the verses, a little bit of goofy organ in some of the breaks), but Andy's vocal parts consistently do something disconcertingly close to what I'd expect from what had come before but just a bit off, and the way the band jarringly crashes into the chorus or throws in the "Ba ba dooo" backing vocals helps make the song a great experience. Even better is the later "Statue of Liberty," which got the band in trouble with the BBC thanks to its lyrics about sailing beneath her skirt (and other lurid things), and which would be a classic if only for the hilarious repeated "Boo boo!!" in the chorus (I assure you, that there is no adequate way to describe in text how that line is sung, and you have to hear it for yourself).

If there's a clear way to divide the rest of the album into conceptual groups for the sake of describing them, then this division would probably need to take place by length. Three of the songs are shorter than 2:10, and on the whole they're pretty spazzy. "Cross Wires" (2:06) takes jazzy dissonance (the guitars, vocals and keyboards seem like they're at war with each other) and rhythmic instability and slams it into a punk format, and the song is entertaining but always leaves me with a sense of "What the hell did I just listen to." "Do What You Do" (1:16) sounds like a polka wedged into a punk song, and "New Town Animal in a Furnished Cage" (1:53) is fairly laid-back until the "I watch TV with an actor's rage" line, at which point the overall sense of the song changes dramatically for me.

Most of the rest of the songs fall into the range of 2:30 to 4:00, and aside from the previously mentioned highlights, the most stand-out songs from this group are "This is Pop" (which goes from sounding exaggerated and dramatic in the beginning to exaggerated and silly in the "THIS IS POP!!! YEAH YEAH!!" chorus) and "I'm Bugged," a droning number most notable for a recurring Eastern-y keyboard line that sounds like a fly that Andy wishes he could swat (and there's an instrumental freak-out in the middle that could easily depict somebody trying to get that stupid bugger). The others in this group ("I'll Set Myself on Fire," "Spinning Top") are fine, with their share of decent ideas (they're both post-punkish with just enough reggae), but neither especially strikes me as noteworthy.

The other two tracks, closing their respective sides, are longer than the typical material of the album, and they vary in quality. The closing "Neon Shuffle" has a good share of ideas but actually has them organized in a pretty sensible manner, building from the nagging guitar-and-keyboard riff of the beginning into the lengthy anthemic climax in the last minute, but the band's cover of "All Along the Watchtower" (lasting a whopping 5:43) is kind of a mess. I don't exactly hate it; the band's choice to start off with a keyboard sound that seems to predict boss-lair music in 8-bit video games is an amusing one, and I don't especially mind the choice to cross harmonica playing with a reggae-ish reinvention of the main riff in the bass, but it gets stretched out far too long, and Andy's vocal delivery (where he takes on his most obnoxious mannerisms and puts stress on each individual syllable a little too forcibly for his own good) leaves much to be desired.

The album also has a good chunk of bonus tracks at the end, and while they don't affect the rating, they're worth mentioning. Some earlier CD pressings of the album made the obnoxious decision to put bonus tracks into the middle of the album, but my edition is kind enough to avoid such nonsense and instead sticks them at the end. Three tracks ("Science Friction," "She's So Square," "Dance Band") make up the band's debut EP (3D-EP), and they basically sound like they could have fit on White Music pretty seamlessly, especially "Dance Band" once it gets to its "Slow! Slow! Quick Quick Slow!" vocal climax at the end. The other four bonus tracks are pretty decent as well; the best of them is "Traffic Light Rock," which sounds like a tight-as-hell Chuck Berry-influenced early Rolling Stones song filtered through the late 70s (especially in the piano in the background).

Overall, this album won't especially please most fans of the band, who would likely have come to this band through music that sounds very little like this, but it's a good album despite its faults. If the idea of "too many hooks" sounds like a contradictory one to you, then it's possible that you might even love it (though it's just as likely that, after hearing this album a couple of times, the idea will seem less contradictory than it once did). I wouldn't recommend making this one of one's first purchases among the band's discography, but it definitely deserves better than its reputation.

Trying to pick out highlights for this is a pretty difficult task; in any given listen, a track might make me go "Ehn, that's pretty nice," while on another it might draw out a more pronounced reaction from me. Based on my most recent listens, the tracks that I fancy most are the opening "Meccanik Dancing (Oh We Go!)" (where Andy sounds like a total dork singing about how he and his chums are gonna have fun dancing this weekend), "Battery Brides (Andy Paints Brian)" (an atmospheric number that is in reference to Brian Eno, whom the band wanted to become their producer), "Crowded Room" (a nice mix of conventional guitars and off-kilter keyboards), "Beatown" (which builds into a rollicking frenzy in the last third) and "My Weapon" (which unfortunately seems to be in reference to Barry Andrews' penis but which is a goofy enough reggae-inflected post-punk number to make it so I don't mind too much). One track that definitely always stands out as a highlight actually wasn't on the original album, but is the only bonus track on my CD so I think of it as such: the single "Are You Receiving Me" prominently features the strongest chorus in this batch of songs, both in the vocals and in the underpinning instrumental parts, and Andy's vocal freak-outs in the verses are entertaining in their own right.

The other tracks don't especially merit their own specific mentions, but again, they're all pretty decent, and if they weren't so fundamentally similar it would be easier to think of things to say about them. All in all, then, these songs might not be among the strongest batches that XTC ever came up with, but if anything that's to XTC's credit; this is still a perfectly decent album that I don't mind at all when listening to, and there are much worse ways for me to have spent my precious listening time. This may be an album primarily for completists, but no XTC fan should consider listening to this as a chore.

The album does start off well enough. "Making Plans for Nigel" is a terrific opening, built around a cycle of interesting guitar ideas over a powerful nagging groove in the rhythm section, with a delightful mix of Colin's and Andy's voices throughout, and it's probably the best song the band had done to this point (the lyrics, about somebody whose future is planned out for him whether he wants that future or not, are interesting in their own right). The following "Helicopter" is an amusing bouncy blast, with a combination of cymbal and other sounds in the background throughout that can't help but remind of a whirling helicopter blade, and it's nearly impossible for me to not get a smile on my face during the silly "She's like a heliCOPTER! COPTER!" chorus. After these two tracks, though, I find myself having a lot of "yeah, that song's pretty good I guess" reactions, and in aggregate I end up feeling a little disappointed. The lyrics are generally interesting, and there's often a lot of energy and some memorable melodies in a given song, but there are few instances where I come out of a song thinking of it as at least a minor classic. My favorite of the remaining tracks is probably "Outside World," which has an oddly country-ish guitar line at the beginning that leads into a punk-based (especially in the "YOU CAN KEEP YOUR ANIMALS/ALL THE NOISE AND THE DIN ..." screamed part in the middle) song that vaguely sounds like it could have belonged on White Music, and "Reel by Reel" has some nice guitar parts and vocal hooks. As for most of the rest, while there's not especially anything wrong with songs like "Day in Day Out," "When I'm With You I Have Difficulty," "Roads Girdle the Globe" and most others (I find "Millions" a little more boring than the others but it's still ok), I just don't find myself loving any of them, and I certainly don't find myself bursting with insights about any of them.

The most controversial track on the album, and the one that departs most strongly from the general vibe of the rest of the album, is the closing "Complicated Game," which grows out of quiet dark atmosphere into a somewhat dragging atmospheric number with Andy screaming his head off by the end. I'd be half-tempted to call it the band's reaction to "Drugs" off of Talking Heads' Fear of Music were it not for the fact that this album came out only two weeks after Fear, which would make such a statement pretty stupid, but it has a similar effect relative to the rest of the album's material as "Drugs" had on that album. As a standalone track, I'm not especially fond of it, but in context, I actually think it helps the album by allowing it to close out in a manner that's definitely more striking than much of what had come before it.

The bonus tracks on my edition are quite nice, especially "Life Begins at the Hop," an upbeat song with some nice guitar interplay and which probably would have tied with "Making Plans for Nigel" as my favorite on the album had it actually been included on the album. "Chain of Command" (with its bits of harmonica oddly sounding like Morse code beeps from a telegraph) and "Limelight" are nice guitar-heavy numbers in their own right, as well.

It's a bit of a strained comparison, I admit, but this album and the two before it really make me feel that a good comparison for the band's career arc at this point was the early Kinks. In this analogy, this album would be The Kink Kontroversy, which is also a perfectly decent album but also sounds to me like the work of a band peaking at a lower level than seems right for a band with so much obvious talent. As with the Kinks between Kontroversy and Face to Face, it was going to take some relatively mild but nonetheless significant tweaking for the band to recalibrate itself to become something approaching potentially great (which XTC did, going well beyond even where The Kinks went with Face to Face). As for this album, well, most people like this a good deal more than I do, so if you consider yourself a budding XTC fan, you should probably pick it up pretty early.

I tried to find a clean way to divide the tracks up thematically, but none emerged as an obvious candidate, so I'll take the easy way out and just go one at a time. "Respectable Street" is an updated take on an old theme, of people living lives that are superficially fine but underneath are scandalous and petty, and the band tackles this with a piece based around jagged guitar parts and catchy-as-hell vocal melodies with lyrics like "Now they talk about abortion/In cosmopolitan proportions to their daughters/As they speak of contraception/And immaculate receptions on their portable/Sony entertainment centers." The best part, though, is probably the introduction, where the band takes the "It's in the order of their hedgerows ..." melody and makes it sound like a very old LP recording, creating the sense of a nostalgic memory of what is ultimately borne out to be an illusion. Immediately following is "Generals and Majors," a bouncy and very happy (largely because the music basically feels like it's constantly running back and forth in long strides from the top of the notes to the bottom of the notes) song with cynical lyrics about the subjects of the title (sample lyrics: "Generals and Majors always seem so unhappy 'less they got a war"), and aside from being incredibly memorable, it always, when I listen to it, makes me feel a little sad that I can't whistle. It's also notable for how it seems to wring out one arrangement variation after another, whether from the whistling, or the bits with humming under the vocal melody, or the softer and gentler bits that the band probably never would have thought to throw in had the song been written two years earlier. "Living Through Another Cuba" stays in the political vein, this time touching on tensions between Russia and the US and the potential of having to go through something like the Cuban Missle Crisis again (the band's pessimistic prediction of another one of these in 1998 fortunately didn't happen), and it's built around drum and guitar parts that somehow manage to vaguely convey a sense of an exotic island location despite not sounding in the least like authentic Cuban music. It's a lot of fun, and the best part is the constantly recurring "Living through another Cuuuuuuuuuu...BAAA" from Andy.

Just as it starts to feel like the band has morphed into a non-stop political commentary machine, the album pulls back the throttle with a jolly and bouncy pop song (with the standard post-punk guitars etc, of course) in "Love at First Sight." There's nothing subversive or especially self-consciously clever in this one; it's just a delightful song with that great rising "What they want is ..." backing vocal hook, and while some might consider this a step too far in their embracing of more traditional pop, I consider it a welcome enhancement. The following "Rocket From a Bottle" is one that I always initially consider a little weaker than the other material, but I end up liking it a good amount when the chorus comes in; the song reminds me in a lot of ways of a second-tier Brian Eno pop song, like a slightly weaker version of "Backwater," and that's not a bad thing at all. The album then pulls away from the lighter tone of the past two tracks with "No Language in Our Lungs," a rather dark and dreary drone about not being able to communicate effectively with the outside world. The lyrical heart of the song is pretty devestating: "I thought I had the whole world in my mouth/I thought I could say what I wanted to say/For a second that thought became a sword in my hand/I could slay any problem that would stand in my way/I felt just like a crusader/Lion-heart, a Holy Land invader/But nobody can say what they really mean to say/The impotency of speech came up and hit me that day/I would have made this instrumental/But the words got in the way."

Following the dark drone about a depressing topic is a bouncy and cheerful song (except in some darker moments) about a depressing topic, courtesy of "Towers of London," which has to be the most fun one can have when listening to a song about a place where people were sent to die. The song is a blast throughout, especially in the oh-so-lovely last minute or so of the song, starting with Andy's and Colin's harmonies on the title, followed by an extended vamp with Andy and Colin singing nonsense fragments over the great underpinning. "Paper and Iron (Notes and Coins)" is probably the album's weakest track, but it still has an interesting rhythm, and the lyrics, about how money is probably totally worthless, are a decent enough bit of social commentary. Somewhat better is "Burning With Optimism's Flames," where the main hook in the faster parts is how so many syllables are packed into the chorus, and which becomes oddly anthemic in the "Now every bird and bee ... / Now every closing door ..." part.

Just in case there was any thought that the album might have packed all of its very best stuff in the first part of the album, I should let you know that the album ends on a very strong note with its last two tracks. "Sgt. Rock is Going to Help Me" is the chipperest combination of faux-tough swagger and bubblegum pop sweetness imaginable, with Andy creating a scenario in which he's going to overcome his awkwardness with girls with the help of a sort of GI Joe figure (this page's tagline is taken from this song, and it makes me smirk every time I hear it). And finally, after this glorious bit of poppiness, we go into oddly dark territory (I guess XTC had decided they wanted to start making a pattern of capping off their albums with non sequiturs) with the seven-minute "Travels in Nihilon," and while I kinda like "Complicated Game," this one wipes the floor with it. It's another long and moody drone, but the underlying drum pattern is complicated and awesome, and the mix of the guitars and the whispers and wailing and whatever else on top of it is intriguing as can be to me. There's no clearly apparent logic in why it lasts as long as it does or why it doesn't last longer, but that doesn't bother me in the least, and I love to get sucked into it.

Once again, there are some bonus tracks, but this time they don't especially add much to the album. "Smokeless Zone" is a decent up-tempo Moulding number with a heavily disco-influenced beat and a bunch of harmonica thrown on top; "Don't Lose Your Temper" is a bouncy 2:30 number with some energetic guitar stuck in the background; and "The Somnambulist" is a slow synth-heavy drone with lots of atmosphere and some neat noises here and there that woudn't have fit in well on the album at all but that is worth hearing on its own.

This isn't quite my favorite XTC album, but it's top 3, and I've liked it pretty much since I first listened to it in full (on a car ride with my brother back from visiting our grandmother sometime in my late 20s). If you're at all favorable towards post-punk and somehow haven't heard this album, then it's an absolute must for you to acquire, and I can't imagine a scenario where somebody would consider themselves an XTC fan without loving this album. If you can't get enjoyment out of "Respectable Street" or "Sgt. Rock is Going to Help Me," then this is not the band for you.

As tended to happen with British punk and new wave acts that had come around in 1977 or 1978, this album showed Partridge and Moulding reacting to entering the early 80s (as well as their own late 20s) by consciously seeking to expand, modernize and refine their sound (similar contemporary examples of this were The Clash's Sandinista!, which came out the year before this one, and The Police's Synchronicity, which came out a year after this one). The band's sharp, jagged, guitar-heavy sound (still going strong on Black Sea) hasn't exactly disappeared, but it's been significantly muted in a way that, distinctive vocals aside, makes the band almost completely unrecognizable as the one that made Drums and Wires just a few years earlier, and even makes it hard to hear the Black Sea band sometimes. For instance, Moulding's "Ball and Chain" definitely sounds like it came from the same band that did "Sgt. Rock is Going to Help Me" when the guitars are prominent, but the song belongs just as heavily to the parts centered around a gentle and simple synth line, and the two pieces make the song better together than they would have if the song had only been centered on one. "No Thugs in Our House" (which has an awesome "where did that come from??" hook leading into each iteration of the incredibly memorable chorus) probably could have fit on Black Sea pretty cleanly, but the only other songs on here that even could have vaguely fit there in terms of how the guitars are used are "Knuckle Down" and "Down in the Cockpit," and even those don't fit the mold of the band's previous work especially well ("Knuckle Down" uses a familiar arrangement approach to create a music hall sort of number, and "Down in the Cockpit" is much more ska-heavy along the lines of something like "Canary in a Coalmine" than anything the band had done to this point).

The rest of the album jumps all over the place in terms of style, and this creates a somewhat bewildering effect that I think works in the album's favor. The opening "Runaways" is completely unrepresentative of the rest of the album, but it could be said that any choice of opener would have been completely unrepresentative of the rest of the album, and the warm-and-dreamy yet dreary atmosphere the band creates (especially in the "Please come home" vocals) is unforgettable. The band closes the first and second halves of the album with a pair of genuinely lovely ballads, much gentler than anything the band had done to this point. "All of a Sudden (It's Too Late)" is a great look at that "Oh crap now what" moment that happens when you come to the realization that something you've counted on is fraudulent, and the cross between the heavy subject matter and the gentleness of the song, punctuated by that rising "All of a sudden ..." backing vocal part, is absolutely reminiscient of prime solo Lennon. The closing "Snowman" is full of hyperactive Partridge-isms that keep it from cleanly fitting in the "ballad" category, but the gentle up-tempo guitars, the pleading verses and the great "And I want to know, man,/why oh why/does she treat me like a snowman?" chorus make it into another classic for the band.

On the other side of the gentler material is the more experimental material, and this mostly works out well. On the relative downside, while I don't exactly dislike them, I get a little bored listening to the acoustic beach muzak of "Yacht Dance" and the slightly plodding "Leisure" (which only becomes especially interesting in the parts around when Andy sings the title in a way only he could), and they're prime evidence for those who would want to assert that this should have been a single-length album (these two tracks were among the ones that got cut for a 1-LP edited release in the US). Two other tracks are potentially easy targets for those who would want to put down the album, but I quite dig both of them; "Melt the Guns" ends up sounding like XTC doing an extended Sandinista!-like reggae-tinged diatribe against firearms, and "It's Nearly Africa" brings World Beat into the band's stylistic fold to hilarious effect. They're both longer than they probably could be (especially "Melt the Guns" which comes in at a whopping 6:34 but could easily have been half as long), and the fact that the band's producer (Hugh Padgham) had previously worked with Peter Gabriel in his 3rd album (which also incorporated World Beat influences, to better effect) slightly makes me raise an eyebrow at the band's stylistic bandwagoning, but I enjoy them enough when on to forgive some of these other issues.

The band's other major experiments on the album are almost complete successes. OK, so "Jason and the Argonauts" might be a little overlong, but it's a great atmospheric presentation of the classic myth, with the guitars mixing with various production effects and Colin's great nagging "There may be no golden fleece but" backing vocals to create something that doesn't exactly go anywhere but sounds nice in the space it occupies. "Fly on the Wall" features a great distortion effect on Moulding's voice in a memorable song that balances guitars and synths well, and "English Roundabout" (also by Moulding) would be a pretty conventional (memorable as can be) ska-laced pop song were it not in 5/4, which gives it an off-kilter feel that makes it seem more intricate than it probably actually is.

For all of the various positive things to say about so much of the album, though, it's ultimately "Senses Working Overtime" that cements a very high grade for this album. Lyrically, it's a celebration of the ability to interact with the world around us, even if the specifics of what we're interacting with might themselves be pretty awful, and Partridge uses all sorts of interesting imagery and clever parallelisms in crafting his best set of lyrics yet. Musically, I love the contrast between the dry tone of the acoustic guitar in the verses and the bubble-gummy chorus, with the huge dramatic build into the chorus each time, and the pounding mid-section (with the "And birds might fall from black skies ..." lyrics) with its falsetto acrobatics, is a piece of heaven. This song is TREMENDOUS, and I'm moderately ashamed to admit that I heard this only after hearing the (disturbingly enjoyable) Mandy Moore cover of it in 2004.

Maybe this grade is a smidge high (I waffled back and forth between a C and D half a dozen times), but I'm inclined to leave it where it is just because it's such an interesting experience in aggregate, even if some of the individual material might not be the greatest. It cemented the idea that the band's evolution from its spastic beginnings had been a successful one, and as long as nothing especially out of the ordinary happened, it seemed like it was nothing but clear sailing for the band ahead.

...

...

Then Andy Partridge had a nervous breakdown on stage and the band stopped doing live concerts.

It's not that there's nothing interesting happening on this album; there are some intriguing stylistic mergings, and some clever production effects and uses of keyboards (there's a mellotron in "Deliver Us From the Elements" for instance), and some nice melody ideas, and generally there's enough to pull this album up to a decent grade. I quite like the gentle balladry of "Love on a Farmboy's Wages," which goes from quiet picking in the verses to more up-beat parts in the rush to the nice chorus, and I also quite like the closing "Funk Pop a Roll," the closest thing on the album to something like the more energetic rock-ish that made up so much of Black Sea. I like the way that "Beating of Hearts" manages to sound simultaneously authentic and completely inauthentic in its attempt at crossing rock and raga; I like the way Moulding sounds so ridiculously serious with the rising mellotron in "Deliver Us from the Elements" even though it's not that serious of a song; I like the jazz-pop interlude of "Ladybird," I like the Steely Dan imitations of "In Loving Memory of a Name," and so on. Pretty much everything here is ok, and all of the songs are nice to hear individually once in a while in an iPod shuffle or the like, but all of it comes together for a pretty "meh" effect. It's not quite as bad as it's often made out to be, and a large part of its exaggeratedly lesser reputation comes from the fact that it's an OK album in a stretch of albums that's otherwise superb, but it's tied with Oranges and Lemons as the worst album the band put out in the 80s, and it's a coin-flip as to whether this or Go 2 is the worst one yet.

The bonus tracks are quite nice, though (it should be noted that "this album is just ok but the bonus tracks rule!!" is a pretty common assessment of Mummer, and I'm hardly breaking ground here); the discrepancy between the quality of the bonus tracks and the main album here is very early Kinks-ish. Two of them are moody instrumentals ("Frost Circus" matches its title well, and "Procession Towards Learning Land" makes ample use of unsettling non-Western tones in the synths over weird chaotic guitars and drums) that suggest the band really was trying a bunch of weird and unsettling stuff that it didn't ultimately feel comfortable in releasing at the time, and the non-instrumentals are even better; any one of them would have cracked the top two of the album had they actually been released, and had they all made it on this album would be rated considerably higher. "Jump" is a fascinating cross of cheery and downcast; the verses are about somebody who's depressed and scared, and the person singing is trying to get through to the depressed person as they stand on an edge (presumably a ledge), but the person's inner voice is singing "Jump jump go ahead and jump jump" in the most upbeat manner, as if that's the best thing they could possibly do. "Toys" is even better, taking a harmonica-laden bluesy stomp foundation and using it for lyrics depcting a world of toys treating each other in just as awful a manner as real people treat each other, but then shifting in the most weirdly uplifting and cheery chorus one could imagine going with the verses. "Gold" is a bouncy number with an AMAZING chorus ("And it's ok, the setting sun will color everything around you gold"), and finally the closing "Desert Island" is a pleasant bit of sea-side acoustic music about how Great Britain really isn't that great. What a great 25 minutes of bonus material!

Clearly, based on the bonus material, the band hadn't lost its way, but at the time, nobody really knew that this material existed (except as B-sides), so it wouldn't have been able to encourage people at the time. All in all, the album is worth having, and the bonus material helps a lot, but there are a lot of XTC albums that are worth getting earlier than this one. The band's studio-only era would get better from here.

These songs make the album sound like a potentially massive comeback, and when I listen to them in a row I always instinctually start to wonder if I should push this album higher into my overall rankings (and definitely in my XTC rankings). And yet, as I listen to the remaining seven tracks, I always find that I enjoy each of them individually, but also that my attention starts to wander a little bit more than I'd prefer. On the plus side, the band really sounds like it's figured out how it wants to sound now that it no longer has to give any attention to the question of how replicate its material in a live setting; the album sounds great (albeit straight out of 1984 in a lot of ways), they take ample advantage of all of the production tricks that are available to them, and they cover enough stylistic ground to give the album enough variety to keep me interested through most of it. On the minus side, even if specifics in the sound have changed, I feel like this album shows the band starting to swing back hard towards their instinctual tendency to sound "clever," as opposed to the tendency they'd developed on Black Sea and English Settlement to sound "smart." Granted, they're "clever" at a higher level than they'd been during the White Music or Drums and Wires eras, so this is hardly a bad thing, but that slight sense of emotional and creative sterility that nagged at me with those earliest albums nags me a little bit with this one. It's not enough to put a substantial dent in my feelings towards the album on the whole (this is still a very high rating all things considered), but it is enough to keep me from regarding it as highly as I might regard some of the band's other albums from this decade.

Still, while the last 60% of the album isn't necessarily a great stretch of music, I still think it's a fun stretch of music, and that goes a long way. Ok, so I'm somewhat ambivalent towards the ballad "This World Over," which sounds weirdly like XTC crossed with solo Sting, but the other six tracks are fine by me. My favorite of the bunch is the big-drum-laden "Reign of Blows," which features Andy encoding his voice as the song careens back-and-forth between uplifting and menacing while out-of-place harmonica pokes its way in from time to time (and good grief this sounds so much like Ween would sometimes sound in 15-20 years), but I'm also pretty fond of "I Bought Myself a Liarbird" (another jazz-pop excursion a la "Ladybird," though this is much more peppy and energetic) and the band's latest attempt to ape Steely Dan in "I Remember the Sun." Elsewhere, "The Everyday Story of Smalltown" is a decent bit of anthemic peppy social commentary that peaks during its kazoo-laden introduction, "You're the Wish You Are I Had" has a nice piano-laden chorus to compensate for a verse melody that might have been over-thought, and finally "Train Running Low on Soul Coal" uses guitars and various keyboard effects to create the effect of a train lurching forward on a train track, with a gentler section popping up (I guess it's the chorus maybe?) to provide some useful contrast to the messiness of the rest.

Of the three bonus tracks, I most prefer "Washaway," a piano-driven Moulding up-tempo number with a top-notch chorus ("Washaway washaway washerette/Washaway washawy every dirty stain you get") and some nice simple guitar lines in the instrumental breaks; . I also quite like "Red Brick Dream," which is two-minutes and actually sounds gentle without getting overly twisted up, and I consider the "hammer-on-anvil" effects tucked into the background a nice touch. "Blue Overall" is kind of a messy end, though, and features a lot of tedious Andy yelling (with some quieter moments for contrast) that would have made this into the worst track on the album had it been part of the original.

It's hard to be too critical of the album on the whole; it's pretty delightful overall, and while its inconsistency means that there are some relative downers, this same inconsistency leads to some pretty great material. And yet, even if I didn't know what was coming next, I would still get the feeling that the band wasn't yet hitting its peak potential as songwriters and arrangers, and that there was still plenty of room for improvement if some breaks went the band's way. If you don't consider yourself an XTC fan based on the albums that are generally rated ahead of this one, then this probably won't convert you, but if you like 80s XTC in general you'll probably at least think this one is ok.

Tood Rundgren may have (based on typical accounts) been an unbearable, overly caustic control freak during these sessions, but he also provided essential direction and vision to the recording process that another producer likely could not have. This vision manifested itself in two primary ways.

First: while listening to demos of the potential inclusions to the album, Rundgren noticed thematic links between some of the material that probably had not been intentional on the part of Partridge and Moulding, and he ended up coming up with a track order that took full advantage of these links. I wouldn't quite call Skylarking a concept album (since a concept album really needs to have some deliberate intent in that direction on the part of the songwriters), but there are extended stretches that definitely feel like they're part of of a concept album, and when I listen to it I tend to hear it (more or less) as a journey from a person's life as a care-free teenager through an emotionally turbulent adulthood, ultimately resolving in their death and cremation.

Second: since XTC had firmly established itself as a studio-only band, and also since XTC had already shown an interest in taking on an explicitly late-60s through its Duke of Stratosphear alter-ego (previous to this album, the band had released 25 O'Clock, which would later be released as part of the Chips from the Chocolate Fireball collection), it made sense for Rundgren to try and make the band's incidental similarities to The Beatles a little more explicit. The songs are still thoroughly in the typical mold of 80s XTC, and many of the production details are clearly contemporary, but Rundgren went all out in conjuring up aspects of late 60s Beatles in the production, and the album ends up sounding in many spots like 80s XTC crossed with Magical Mystery Tour and Abbey Road. The production strikes a nearly perfect balance between honoring the past and not becoming enslaved to it, and for me it's definitely a major factor in boosting this from an album that I really like into one that I absolutely adore.

The opening tracks make it clear that Rundgren has brought the band a polish that it previously lacked, and while I can understand the disappointment of those whose ideal version of the band involves the guitars and rough edges of previous years, the transformation strikes me as a beneficial one. The first two tracks are meant to be listened to as a pair, and together they do an incredible job of conjuring up the blissful lack of direction that one has in life as a teenager on summer break. "Summer's Cauldron" features some sound effects courtesy of chirping crickets and other bug/bird noises, but there's also a terrific quiet synth in the background that can't help but remind me of a hot, shining sun, and Todd's short tune on melodica (which is deployed only five times in the song but is so impressive that it ends up feeling like the dominant part of the song at first) helps tie together a collection of semi-directionless vocal melodies and piano parts into a 3-minute dose of atmospheric bliss. Then, after a rousing build and without a break, the album breaks into the Colin-penned "Grass," which continues the romanticization of pre-adulthood begun by the Andy-penned "Summer's Cauldron." The song's central idea ("Shocked me too the things we used to do on grass") is, of course, a double entendre, and the arrangements play this up to the hilt; on the one hand, the song is filled with keyboards that evoke the quintessential psychedelic and hippie imagery of the late 60s (essentially representing the 'naughty' side of smoking grass and doing other things in public that could potentially get one arrested), and on the other, the song also features some hilarious plucked strings (essentially representing the 'nice' side of the phrase, with people playing games on lawns and in fields etc), and the juxtaposition of the two, combined with how fun the tune is, makes it one of my favorite XTC songs (there are a lot of my favorite XTC songs on this album, get used to this sentiment).

The next two tracks are a bit directionless in terms of not especially moving things one way or another in terms of whatever concept the album has, but the songs also depict a fairly directionless point in the life of the singer (in terms of relationships with women at least), so that at least somewhat fits. "The Meeting Place" is another Moulding song, this time about meeting with a girl whenever and wherever it can be squeezed in (which seems to be rarely), and its most prominent feature (the tune itself is nice but not spectacular) is found in the production, which makes no secret in the chorus that it's from 1986 but somehow finds the perfect way to keep that from becoming problematic. Much better is Andy's "That's Really Super, Supergirl," which was the first XTC song that I loved and which made it into multiple CD mixes before I was even sure that I liked the band that much overall. The song doesn't have a single clearly outstanding feature, and thus it may be puzzling as to why somebody would rate it so highly; rather, it's always struck me as a song with a lot of interesting elements (the different percussion sounds, the chintzy keyboard part, the awkward-but-memorable verse and chorus melodies, the amusing lyrics, the short solo played on a guitar borrowed from Eric Clapton) in perfect balance with each other, and this reaction hasn't diminished despite the fact that I've listened to the song enough times through the years to make it a burnout candidate.

The next three songs, which close out the first half of the album, show Andy temporarily displacing his inner Lennon entirely in favor of his inner McCartney, and while I'm guessing that many fans of the band are the kinds of jaded sorts for whom such an action would constitute near heresy, I nonetheless enjoy this stretch tremendously. It's not quite right to say that Andy is directly emulating McCartney here, but Andy (no doubt through a tremendous amount of coaxing from Todd) actually seems to embrace the idea that it's not a crime to be gentle and sentimental, and the effects are magical. "Ballet for a Rainy Day" is gentle piano pop with a TREMENDOUS mid-section (the "When it rains it rains ..." verse), and it crosses quiet contemplation and memorable tunefulness with great aplomb. "1000 Umbrellas" is Andy having trouble getting over a girl, done in a melodramatic way that might be stupid if the accompanying strings (arranged by David Gregory) weren't so comically over-the-top, and "Season Cycle" is a sudden return to memorable peppy upbeat cheer (the implication is that it's because, after all of his bellyaching, he's finally stumbled into love and is over the moon about it), and while I definitely couldn't envision McCartney ever writing a lyric that contained the words "verdant spiral," I could definitely envision him writing a chorus that started with "Darling don't you ever stop to wonder" and went from there. Plus, that "Autumn is royal/As Spring is clown/But to repaint Summer/They're closing Winter down" part could stay in my head forever if it wanted to.

Side one ends on a chipper note with the "Weather Trio" as I like to think of them, but side two, while it's peppy and upbeat in spots, is pretty heavy lyrically and in vibe. While this side could be considered a downer and a buzzkill, I find it fascinating, and it cements the position of this album in my overall hierarchy. "Earn Enough for Us" is where the protagonist has to confront the reality that "All You Need is Love" is a crock, because with the love of his life comes responsibilities. He has a crappy, demeaning job, the best house he can afford is a major fixer-upper ("Found a house that won't repair itself/With its windows cracking/And a roof held together with holes," - by the way, for the longest time I thought that line was "...held together with a hose," which I considered even funnier), and now there's a kid on the way so he has to actually get married. The song itself is a triumph, primarily featuring Andy singing a terrific vocal part over an intoxicating drum part with subtle bits of growling guitars providing some heft, but also featuring (at the beginning and a couple of times near the end) an amazing simple guitar/keyboard line over the main chord sequence that, by itself, makes the song seem 50% grander than it might otherwise seem. Then, suddenly, marriage is upon us in the Colin-penned "Big Day," an Eastern-tinged slightly droning number that tries to convey a muted sense of chipperness while acknowledging that statistics aren't totally in the couple's favor. Then comes trouble in paradise; "Another Satellite" was inspired by Andy's mixed feelings about a potential affair that had been lurking for a while, and the song makes use of space imagery to convey the tension of two entities that probably won't 'collide' but that are locked in an orbit with each other. The song creates an incredible atmosphere, especially in the processed guitar sound that for whatever reason evokes early 80s educational videos about space for me, and Andy puts on an amazing performance, especially in those moments where he briefly goes into his upper range with "So circling we'll orbit ..." but also in the general care and control of his singing. This song is oh so close to qualifying as a third "best song" for me.

After this track is the point when controversy concerning the album's proper contents begins. The original UK LP version's next track is "Mermaid Smiled," a 2:26 dose of melancholy low-key acoustic guitars, moody xylophones (or vibes, I'm not 100% sure), other bits of amusing percussion, and Andy singing about seeing children and letting it prompt memories of once was for him. This in turn was followed by "The Man Who Sailed Around His Soul," which I always hear as a man experiencing a significant mid-life crisis that prompts deep internal reflection, and which always makes me envision a bunch of people getting in tune with nature while sitting around a campfire and lightly banging on drums while they talk out their feelings. The US version, and subsequent CD versions (eventually corrected; more on this later), removed "Mermaid Smiled" from the album, and the replacement track, placed after "The Man Who Sailed Around His Soul," was "Dear God," which had originally been a B-side when "Grass" was released as a single. "Dear God" is a fiercely anti-theistic song, starting with a young girl (the daughter of one of Rundgren's friends) singing a letter the child wrote expressing doubts the existence and/or goodness of God, and which morphs into Andy singing a continuation of these thoughts before the song wraps up with the voice of the child. The lyrics captured enough attention to prompt a decent amount of radio play, and this led to the song forcing its way into the album, even if it didn't really belong, and there's a good contingent of people who strongly dislike the song because it messes up the flow of the album. Personally, I like the song, even if it doesn't fit in terms of the musical styles around it; I like the low-key guitar parts, I like the big angry drum fill right before Andy starts singing, I like the bits of violin thrown in, and I like Andy's anger and passion as he sings the lyrics. Plus, I would dispute that this song is really that out of place; in terms of the broad flow of general ideas covered in the second half, this song slots in well as an expression of a mid-life/late-life philosophical crisis.

The album finishes with a pair of Moulding songs, and they're both great. "Dying" in this spot implies that the couple patched up its differences and that they lived together until the wife died, and the song depicts all of the sad reactions everybody had when she died, capping off with the final thought of "But I don't want to die like you/Don't want to die like you." The song is basically just Moulding on acoustic guitar, with some other instruments used sparingly, but the most interesting additional detail is the return of a nagging *tick-tock* that first popped up in "The Meeting Place" and has changed meaning from "waiting for the person I'm going to meet" into something far drearier. Finally, the album wraps up with "Sacrificial Bonfire," which centers around a simple-but-gorgeous acoustic guitar line with prominent percussion in the background, and which grows into a climactic "SACRIFICIAL BONFIIIIIRE ... must burn" before eventually doing the same basic music again, this time with string arrangements on top that make me feel all kinds of emotions every time.

For me, this is an amazing album, an incredible culmination of multiple extremely talented people getting together and bringing out the best in each other. Oddly enough, though, the album actually had something objectively wrong with it; for all of Rundgren's great work in producing the album, it turned out that his studio had some incorrect wiring in place, and while the band felt that something about the album didn't sound right, nobody could put their finger on what it was. In 2010, a "corrected polarity" version of Skylarking was issued on vinyl, and a CD reissue followed in 2014. In addition to fixing the production issues (the new version does sound better, with slightly stronger bass and drums), the band also decided to settle the "Mermaid Smiled"/"Dear God" issue by including both tracks, with "MS" in its original spot and "DG" in its spot following "The Man ... ". This version is probably the definitive version (and it has the originally intended cover, which is significantly less safe for work than the image above), but I would note that my overwhelmingly positive feelings on this album came from listening to my original "flawed" version on CD.

This album can be summarized as a love-letter from the band to late 60s pop, in particular late-60s psychedelia-centric pop. Sometimes this involves songs that are clear imitations of specific bands; "Bike Ride to the Moon" is clearly an ode to Syd Barrett's Pink Floyd, "Vanishing Girl" is an ode to The Hollies, "You're My Drug" is probably an ode to '66-'68 Byrds, "You're a Good Man Albert Brown" is basically a dead-on imitation of The Kinks doing music-hall, "Pale and Precious" is a dead-on imitation of Smile-era Beach Boys, and there are some other examples that don't immediately come to mind. More generally, though, this album nails the small details of the era in a way to a degree that's somewhat terrifying; the specific organ tones, the exaggerated use of the stereo format, the ridiculous narrations between tracks, and other features help make these songs sound like perfectly authentic undiscovered wonders of the era. And that's really the main draw here; everything on here sounds either like (a) a top-notch undiscovered rarity from one of the major bands of the late 60s, or (even better) (b), a top-notch contender for inclusion on the Nuggets 2 boxset. The stylistic flourishes are a blast, and the songs are so memorable and jam-packed with clever twists and turns that I can't help but enjoy this collection a tremendous amount.

In terms of comparing the constituent albums of the project, it's hard for me to pick one over the other; 25 O'Clock might be a little better on a per-minute basis, but Psonic Psunspot has about 40% more material, and the band relishes in the total absurdity of the project a little more fully in the latter, to good effect. "25 O'Clock" starts with clocks everywhere if you're listening on headphones, then it turns into an up-tempo number with a nervous bassline and a hilariously dead-on late 60s organ, and by the end it's turned into an enormous anthem with an over-the-top pompous flourish in its last seconds. "Bike Ride to the Moon," as mentioned is a dead-ringer for Pink Floyd circa Piper at the Gates of Dawn, and not just because the song has "Bike" in the title; the chaotic pianos and Andy's vocal parts sound like they were taken straight out of those sessions. "My Love Explodes" is centered around an upwards guitar-lick that sounds much more menacing than the cheery bulk of the song, and all of the silly studio effects (slide whistles etc) help make the song a blast. "What in the World??" is full-fledged psychedelic pop, with gobs of mellotron individual instrument samples and backwards guitars fleshing out the sound, and while the song might have been able to get by at about 3:30 instead of 5:00, the extended instrumental freak-out at the end seems weirdly appropriate. "Your Gold Dress" is dark sitar-driven hard-psych-rock with a hilariously out-of-place happy piano part, and finally "The Mole From the Ministry" alternates between ridiculous voice distortion in the verses and an uplifting chorus (once again full of mellotron) that makes me imagine McCartney creating a happy pop anthem out of the back-and-forth underpinning piano line in "I am the Walrus," and the last two minutes are a glorious mishmash of every spare 1967 cliche the band could find, smushed into one place.

In the Psonic Psunspot half, I don't quite love everything like I do in the first half ("Have You Seen Jackie?" and "Shiny Cage" are both a little boring and draggy, and "You're My Drug" isn't quite as impeccable of a specific-band-ode as others in this collection are), but the best stuff is really good in its own right. The Hollies and Kinks odes are excellent, "Brainiac's Daughter" sounds like it should have been a McCartney contribution to The Beatles, "Little Lighthouse" fuses unsettling dark guitar parts with a great upbeat number in a terrific way, "Collideascope" goes from enjoyable verses to the best chorus on the album ("Wakey wakey wakey little sleep ..."), "The Affiliated" has some great harmonies, and the closing "Pale and Precious" sounds so much like it came from an obscure Smile-session bootleg that it's mind-boggling. The soft organ with Andy singing solo over it, the various harmonies (high and low), the Pet Sounds-like Christmas music break, the dead-on use of theramin ... I would have loved to have known Brian Wilson's reaction if he ever heard this. It's a perfect closer for the album.

In a certain sense, this is the least essential album the band ever made, since it showed them dropping any pretense of attempting to figure out their own stylistic approach at a given point, and since it's an album where enjoyment of and familiarity with music from a previous era is an absolute pre-requisite for enjoying this. At the same time, while the album may be inessential, it also contains some of their very best songs, and the best songs are so great that this album ends up settling in as my second favorite from the band. In terms of recommendation, well, I can't imagine a situation where a fan of XTC wouldn't also enjoy The Dukes, even if it might not have that much appeal for those that aren't XTC fans..

The production on this album, courtesy of rookie producer Paul Fox (and certainly with the band's blessing), is overdone to an almost comical degree. Layers upon layers upon layers of overdubs are piled up in every track, and while I assume that the goal of this approach was to create an overwhelming and psychedelic-tinged effect, the approach instead numbs me to the overall sound and makes me feel kinda bored. It certainly doesn't help my listening that, on top of all of the overdubs, the sound is polished and glossy in a very late 80s sort of way, and I find myself desperately wishing for a return to the slightly rougher edges of English Settlement or The Big Express.

Making matters worse is that this is a double album, with 15 tracks stretching the album's length out to over an hour. Generally, I'm more partial to double albums than many are, and I'm very fond of the band's first double album (the aforementioned ES), but this album has neither the thematic unity nor the stylistic sprawl/messiness that tends to draw me to such endeavours. Instead, the album settles in a pretty annoying middle ground, where the songs are basically different from each other in their core, but where they're all wedged into the same general production mold, and this causes most of the middle tracks (defined as 5-14 or so) to not really make much of an impression on me. Out of this stretch, I'd say that I have a special fondness for "The Loving" (which basically sounds like second-tier solo Macca, but it would be high in that tier) and Moulding's "Cynical Days" (which has a great "Help me get through these cynical days ..." chorus), but while I don't dislike any of the other tracks in this stretch, I don't have strong feelings for them either.

The album does begin and end pretty strongly, so at least that's in its favor. The opening "Garden of Earthly Delights" is the production-overload/neo-psychedelia approach of the album in its most concentrated form, but the song is full of energy and an ever-unfolding cavalcade of hooks, so the song comes off very well. Even better is "Mayor of Simpleton," an up-tempo poppy delight with a magnificent chorus of "And I may be the mayor of simpleton/but I know one thing and that's I love you," and the Colin backing vocals provide some great memorable parts on their own. "King for a Day" is more strikingly mainstream 80s than anything the band had done to this point, but somehow the way it glides along is enough to make it attractive without it doing much else, and the weird slow marching band-ish "Here Comes President Kill Again" is an awkward mishmash of political-themed lyrics, rising horns and a moderately memorable alternate melody that sounds more like solo Roger Waters (except in the "Ain't democracy wonderful ..." part where it, again, sounds like solo Macca) than XTC but somehow manages to be enjoyable rather than stupid. At the end of the album, I find myself enjoying "Miniature Sun" more than I probably should (the cross of the lounge jazz melody and the blaring keyboard trumpet makes it sound like a decent track off of ELP's Works 2, which is why I ultimately settled on not disliking it), and the closing "Chalkhills and Children" is a slow, atmospheric and keyboard-laden ballad (with just a hint of cheeriness) that lets the album end in a way that leaves a decent taste in my mouth.

To be honest, I long expected that I would eventually come around more to this album than I did; it just didn't quite make sense for me to like Skylarking and Chips so much more than this when they were made around the same time and had a similar style. Unfortunately, there are just too many little things working against this album, even if, as I said, I enjoy all of the songs here at least somewhat on an individual basis (even stuff like "Poor Skeleton Steps Out" and "Across This Antheap," which are essentially the weaker descendants of the "ethnic" explorations on ES but are still kinda fun). This is worth tracking down for the best stuff, but if you're an XTC fan, don't go into it with the same expectations that you'd have for their earlier classics.

The easiest way to sort through this is chronologically rather than in track order, so that's the general course I'll take. The White Music era doesn't contribute anything, while the Go 2 era provides a Moulding rarity (released on a flexidisc as a magazine insert) entitled "Looking for Footprints" that basically sounds like an average track from that album, as well as a couple of B-sides entitled "Strange Tales, Strange Tails" and "Officer Blue" that Andy once called two of their worst tracks (he's closer to right than wrong here but I still kinda like them). The Drums and Wires era, on the other hand, contributes a good chunk of material. Aside from a single version of "Ten Feet Tall" and a BBC version of "Scissor Man," there's an odd but decent 1:33 B-side called "Pulsing Pulsing," but the goofiest inclusion is a Moulding-penned single that the band released under the name "The Colonel" in 1980 (the B-side, entitled "I Need Protection," is also attributed to "The Colonel" but sounds much more like Drums and Wires XTC). "Too Many Cooks in the Kitchen" is as hokey as can be in its bounciness and especially in its female backing vocal part, but it's an absolute hoot and I'm glad it was included on this compilation.

The Black Sea era is relatively scant, as it contributes a single version of "Respectable Street" (with hilariously censored lyrics like "Now they talk about absorption ..."), as well as a typical BS-style up-tempo guitar-rocker (written specifically for the movie Time Square) and a hilarious 22-second snippet called "The History of Rock 'N' Roll" that closes the compilation. Then comes the English Settlement-era material, which is pretty great overall and takes up a pretty large chunk of the album. The B-sides from this era show that the band, far from stretching itself thin to make ES into a double album, was on a creative roll, and the album could potentially have been even better than it ended up. "Over Rusty Water" is a full-fledged 1:26 ambient piece (and it's good!!); "Heaven is Paved With Broken Glass" crosses the band's earlier guitar rock style with updated synths just as well as "Ball and Chain" did; "Punch and Judy" is a fun little rocker with a lot of swing; "Tissue Tigers" and "Blame the Weather" are each rousing and interesting anthems in their own way; and "Cockpit Dance Mixture" is a remix of "Down in the Cockpit" that takes the same sort of approach that The Clash did in reworking "Rock the Casbah" into "Mustapha Dance." Then, sometime after the ES sessions began but before the band entered the Mummer era, the band decided to release a Christmas-themed pair of songs under the name "The Three Wise Men," and they're a total crackup. "Thanks for Christmas" is the most memorable and uplifting Christmas song that I could imagine sung by a solid atheist like Andy Partridge, and the layering of guitars and diverse keyboard sounds (some imitating horns in a cliche holiday way but some adding other interesting aspects) is every bit as polished as the band had shown itself capable of doing to this point. The flip-side is "Countdown to Christmas Party Time," which milks 1983 drum machine sounds for all of their worth to help create incredibly dorky music that somehow works because it's XTC and because it's the least Christmas-sounding Christmas music imaginable.

The Mummer era features a couple of obscurities that didn't get released until 1989; "The World is Full of Angry Young Men" is another decent Moulding-sung Steely Dan imitation, and "Happy Families" is a decent uplifting piano-driven song that that made its public debut in the movie She's Having a Baby. The Big Express gets skipped over, and the album rounds out with three tracks from the Skylarking era. One of them is "Mermaid Smiled," which (as mentioned previously) had originally made it onto the album but had gotten bumped for "Dear God" after it became a minor hit; one of them is the opening B-side "Extrovert," which sounds much more like an above-average Black Sea extra than something from Skylarking (though the synth blasts sound more mid-80s than early 80s), and which has a great chorus; and finally there's a GREAT BBC version of "Another Satellite," where the processed guitars of the original become stronger and where all of the important aspects of the studio version translate very well into live performance (well, sort of live; they recorded the backing track right before they went on and sang to that).

If this isn't quite an essential album for XTC fans (the BBC tracks are now available elsewhere, as are the band's A-sides), then it's close, if only because, in the CD age, it's the easiest way to gather up all of the great B-sides that have been mentioned here (as of this writing, the various available re-issues do not have the bulk of these tracks available as B-sides). Maybe the world could have gotten by if Go 2 rarities had faded into the ether, but it would be a shame if all of these great 1982 and 1983 rarities were forgotten. If you consider yourself a fan, and especially if you're a fan of English Settlement, this is absolutely worth hunting down.

As I said, there are some really good songs on here, and a shorter (40 minutes or so) version of this album that kept these songs would be significantly better than the finished product. "The Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead" is almost a little too blatant in its efforts to be a giant rousing 90s pop rock anthem, but it succeeds nonetheless; allegorical lyrics aside, the song has some striking twists in its chord sequences, and the mix of the prominent drums and guitars with the occasional harmonica makes for a great simple arrangement. "The Disappointed" is another "we are gunning for a hit single and just try to stop us" song, and there are some vocal hooks in this that rate among the best that Andy has ever written. "Omnibus" is a piano-driven song with some great horn parts that's as hokey as can be but all the better for it; "Then She Appeared" is a ballad centered around a terrific gentle rising guitar line; "Wrapped in Grey" is sentimental orchestrated balladry with some incredible backing vocals from Colin; and the closing "Books are Burning" is a gentle and memorable anthem about a terrible topic with some great guitar soloing in the last minute or so. So far so good.

Unfortunately that leaves 11 tracks, but it's not as simple as splitting this album into "the good tracks" and "the bad tracks." Rather, these 11 tracks all have some aspect that would make me interested in hearing them individually once in a while, but that also leave me wondering why the band couldn't parlay those aspects into better songs. Without belaboring the point (since I have no desire to say some variation of the same thing for 11 tracks), I'll touch on three of the tracks in a little bit of detail. Moulding's "My Bird Performs" starts out sounding like a potential classic, with a nervous guitar line skittering in the background that occasional gives way to more atmospheric parts, while Moulding sings melodies that are fragmented just enough for them to be atmospheric and image-provoking on their own. It's a great collection of ideas, but the song somehow runs out of steam and becomes a little boring two minutes in, and the four-minute length ends up feeling weirdly excessive. In the middle of the album, "Rook" is Andy backed by piano, horn and some strings, and it has a lot of atmosphere and emotion, yet I always feel less impact from it than I feel like Andy intended. And finally, I like the weirdly muted approach the band takes to the arrangement of "War Dance," especially with the synth-clarinet, but the final combination of the anti-war lyrics and the actual song ends up pretty sounding dorky to me.

This album actually got the band a Grammy nomination, but this feels like one of those situations where recognition was bestowed on a five year lag from when it was actually deserved, and I feel like the band had reached somewhat of a dead-end at this point. The seven-year standoff between XTC and Virgin that began after this album was unfortunate, but if the alternative was for them to bounce from one producer to another who didn't totally know how to make them sound or how to edit them, then I'm not convinced that the loss was a tragic one. As for this album, it's good and it's probably one that most XTC fans will want, but it's definitely an afterthought in the band's career.

There are a couple of ways in which I think that the extended layoff and everything that went with it benefited the band significantly in regards to this album and its successor. The obvious one is that the layoff provided Andy an extended period in which he could not only write songs but also give some significant thought to which ideas might be best left unrecorded (this stands in contrast to the band's previous approach of pretty much recording everything and then sorting through it later), and it's partially for this reason that I find the quality control on this album (and the next one to a lesser extent) significantly higher than that of Oranges and Lemons and Nonsuch. A less obvious one is certainly debatable, but I think it's pretty clear: the extended layoff freed the band from any illusions that it had any significant chance at major commercial success, and this also freed the band from any perceived need to make itself sound at all contemporary (if they wanted to sound contemporary they could, but there wasn't an obligation to do so). Even if this sounds nothing like that album, Apple Venus exudes a "To hell with what people want, we're going to make music that we want" confidence more than any XTC album since The Big Express, and this strongly fits the notion of XTC as a pop band that didn't quite make regular pop music.

The album gets off to a fascinating start with "River of Orchids," which initially struck me as a bit of a confused mess but had won me over by the third listen. Water drops, intricate keyboard strings, and other programmed orchestrations interact with a seemingly rambling vocal part that's occasionally tempered by a more compact vocal part, and by the last couple of minutes the different parts of the song are locked into an intricate dance around each other that hasn't stopped impressing me yet. "I'd Like That" steps away from orchestration into top-notch acoustic-driven pop with Andy once more aping prime McCartney at his own game, and Colin's backing harmonies are as perfect as they were in the band's peak era (even if Colin himself is starting to sound a little older). "Easter Theatre" is unremarkable in the verses (which are sometimes filled with orchestration and sometimes with bits of guitar), but the "Stage left ... stage right ..." backing vocals around the secondary/"chorus" melody are spectacular, and the "Easter in her bonnet ..." mid-section is just oh so gorgeous.

"Knight in Shining Karma" is quieter and not so striking (still quite good though), and reminds me in a way of the kinds of quieter songs that Steve Hackett would be sometimes be putting on his solo albums in subsequent years. "Frivolous Tonight" initially starts off sounding like it's going to turn into "Go Now," but then it turns into a cheerful and nostalgic-sounding Colin piano-heavy number, and all the various keyboard embellishments (I'm assuming that the trumpet and mellotron parts are all coming from a regular keyboard) help make it a delight. Then comes "Greenman," which brings an exotic Eastern tinge and actual orchestration (courtesy of Mike Batt), and it does an admirable job of striking a balance between its epic and grand aspects, on the one hand, with its playful aspects, on the other.

One song that might appeal strongly to people who otherwise don't like this album much is "Your Dictionary," a straightforward acoustic number with great lyrics like "S-H-I-T/Is that how you spell 'me' in your dictionary?" and a very memorable melody to deliver them. "Fruit Nut" is a Colin number that might be a little too much whimsy even for my tastes, but the last three tracks set things right in terms of arrangements, anthemic power and memorable melodies. "I Can't Own Her" walks the line between "rousing emotional experience" and "emotional schlock" a few times in the more heavily orchestrated parts, but it never crosses the line, and the chorus of "And I can't own her ... / And I never will" has a vibe to it that absolutely fascinates me. "Harvest Festival" is the album's second major instance of Andy writing material that competes with anything McCartney ever wrote; aside from the gentle and pretty verses, it boasts that INCREDIBLE hook of "That longing look you gave me / That longing loooook," and the mid-song "What a year when the exams and crops all failed ..." is just breathtaking. And finally, "The Last Balloon" is relatively spare and atmospheric, with an epic set of "Climb aboard, climb aboard you (menfolk/women/children) ..." verses, and the lengthy coda, with the balloon floating away as a lonely trumpet plays over a vamp of the backing track, makes for a stunning and memorable finish.

Song-specific details aside, I think what fascinates me most about this album is that Andy found just the right way for the band (and himself) to age. This material is clever and eccentric and memorable, on the one hand, but there's also a sense of emotional openness and vulnerability here that hadn't been typical of the band in the past, aside perhaps from a few songs here and there (mostly on Skylarking). I don't think it's quite the best XTC album, but it is the one that I would be most likely to recommend to somebody who had sampled a few of XTCs songs and didn't express a warm feeling towards the band. If the idea of a gentler, more restrained version of the band doesn't put you off, then this is an absolute must for your collection.

Since I feel like I should single out at least a few tracks when I feel that the album deserves a solid "good" rating, I'll mention some that I've consistently found a little more notable than others. "Stupidly Happy" sounds (unintentionally, I'm sure) like Ween doing their take on a Stones rocker, thanks to Andy sounding eerily like Gene Ween and his guitar focusing on playing a very simple riff over and over. Keeping in the Stones vein, Colin's three numbers here strike me as serving much the same function as numbers with Keith Richards singing on late-period Stones albums; they're change-of-pace tracks, with "In Another Life" featuring some jolly harmonica over the basic instrumental pattern, "Boarded Up" featuring an unsettling mood over the acoustic guitar, and "Standing in for Joe" featuring an odd mix of styles that Colin once described as "Glam stomp meets Country and Western." "I'm the Man Who Murdered Love" comes a little closer to generic radio fodder than I'd prefer from XTC, but the way Andy sings the title, capped off by the silly "Yeah!" is enough to make me not feel too ashamed for enjoying it. "Church of Women" has Andy on acoustic guitar over an interesting drum pattern in the verses, and the jump from the normal-register verses and the first part of the chorus into the lower-register "main" chorus amuses me every time. And finally, the closing "The Wheel and the Maypole" is a merging of two incomplete song fragments, and both of them feature Andy at his best; the "And if the pot won't hold our love ..." chorus of the former ("The Wheel") is a great display of the rocking version of Andy, and everything about the latter ("The Maypole") is a great display of the bouncy poppy version of Andy.

The other tracks are all fine, but they're clearly not in the first or second tier of XTC's work, and thus I don't see a need to reference them specifically. XTC had been very successful with guitar-centric music throughout its life, of course, but Andy (and Colin to the extent that he was involved on this album) sounds out of practice and (at this point) a little out of place in the world of simplistic guitar rock. Still, while the album isn't quite a raging success, it's still quite good, and if you bought Apple Venus Volume 1 you may as well get its companion. More importantly, while Andy and Colin probably didn't intend this at the time, this ended up as the final XTC album; Andy and Colin briefly reunited with Dave under the Dukes banner for one track, and a handful of tracks trickled out thereafter, but Colin eventually got tired of music, and Andy rightly decided that XTC couldn't continue without him. And thus passed one of the greatest rock/pop acts of the age.