XTC : Classic or Dud.

I actually was ripping all my XTC discs the other week, but I wasn't compelled to listen to any of them. Then again there's a lot of stuff that I got into around that time (specifically late eighties/early nineties) which falls into that category.

Watch yo ass homies coz gangsta andy partridge is gonna pop a cap in it.

haha love gangsta andy partridge

i just listened to black sea yesterday

I thought there was hella XTC love on ILM, not quite sure where you're getting this vibe from, staggerlee...lord knows I'll sing their praises to anyone who'll listen.

Think it totally says something about Andy that the cruelest, most harrowing post-divorce sentiment he could etch into song was an extended metaphor about spelling.

xpost

I guess I was expecting MASSIVE WAVES of love, not a high percentage of "ehr, I liked their early stuff OK but I totally lost track after Skylarking" and the like. Though I should have known better since ILM generally seems to have trouble with sincerity in lyrics (yes, I cringe when I hear "The Loving." I also wish I were brave enough to write something as plainspoken as that, or as "Melt the Guns." And let's not get into the thorny issue of "Dear God".) When I made that post I also only had seen the first page of the search results, so I mistakenly thought that there were only 5 XTC threads on ILM. Whoop. I've spent the intervening 2 hours reading the rest of them...

Heartened to see that there are a number of obsessives here (hi, all! Were any of you denizens of the now defunct xtcidearecords forum? I lost years of my life there.)

I love Bimble's talk of XTC "trips". This is absolutely the case; there are times when no other music seems right for me. For weeks and months at a time.

Am I alone in unreservedly loving Oranges and Lemons (although I recognize there are lesser songs on it) and Wasp Star? Alzo: has their star fallen dramatically in the past few years and is it time for a mini-revival? There was talk of another round of remasters to have been released starting this April, but that seems to have fallen (as so many putative XTC projects) by the wayside. (I want them to do a mono box set, just to see Geir's reaction.)

l0u1s jagg3r loved some of the later albums

wasp star is horrible imo, the shitty production is part of it but the songs aren't so hot either. apple venus was mostly great, so it was a bad way to end.

I like Mummer, Colin's throwaway songs aside. I really really like Apple Venus, Colin's throwaway songs aside.

Oranges and Lemons was always one of my faves too, so no, you're not alone.

Phil, have you lost GAP's password?

Er, I didn't mean Mummer, I meant Nonsuch. So I am going mad.

I can't really bust out the GAP material while posting from work (xp)

FREE GANGSTA ANDY PARTRIDGE

I too love a good deal of Oranges & Lemons, except for say Pink Thing and Hold Me My Daddy. I find that even weaker XTC songs tend to have at least one section that is great. Totaly misleading cover artwork though, I remember people buying it at the time expecting some top hat wearing, twirly moustached psychedelic extravaganza then got hit with total kitchen sink production and lost heart a third of the way in.
There are moments on songs like Across This Antheap, Chalkhills & Children and One Of The Millions that for me, are up there with their finest work.

l0u1s jagg3r loved some of the later albums

What happened to L0u1s, anyway?

he's on tour with the vacuum

Skylarking and Oranges and Lemons feel like the same one-two punch to me that Drums and Wires and Black Sea were: undoubtedly my four favorite albums in their catalog (and four of my favorite albums ever). Most days I'd call O&L the best of the four. I second that comment that even the weak songs on that album have something interesting about them.

But Wasp Star... yeah, I can't rep for it. :( I've given it a lot of listens, but the simplicity always comes across as laziness, or maybe weariness. "Clouds" and "Maypole" have a little more to them, and those are keepers. Some of the other songs are not bad, but I think it's probably their worst album overall.

In-case anyone is interested there's some weapons-grade XTC internet nerdery on the XTC Fans Myspace, some chap has been interviewing Andy, Colin or Dave about the writing of specific songs and putting up the transcriptions.

http://blogs.myspace.com/xtcfans

Time to take an XTC trip, indeed.

This band's b-sides and castoffs are all worth exploring and are often just more damn FUN than their LPs.

Don't you dare call me chickenhead!

Have long been mystified by XTC's relative lack of love. It seems they're one of those bands that if you don't love, you really don't even like, or don't get. I think part of this is down to Partridge's voice, which is an acquired taste-- and certainly his songwriting. He's super smart, and is a pretty amazing craftsman...but what he chooses to create is often so idiosyncratic, so of its own world, that unless you want to live in that world too, it might seem a bit uninviting, or even actively offputting.

Idiosyncratic makes him seem more interesting than he actually is, not that I don't like XTC, but they are irritating

... or rather, he is irritating

do you see?!?

See what?

It seems they're one of those bands that if you don't love, you really don't even like, or don't get.

I like XTC, I don't love them

you THINK you like them. you don't.

especially if you are using the word irritating to describe partridge

OK, are you being serious here, or you having a laugh? Hard to tell over the internet.

Comparing my likes of 20 yrs ago with my likes now, XTC have taken what might be the biggest plunge, and I wish it weren't so.

I still think that (excepting Robyn Hitchcock) they're the finest melodists and hook-merchants of the post-beatles school, and Black Sea is a kind of apotheosis of hooky-but-skronky pop guitar... but every year I age seems to make the schoolmasterish finish of Andy's lyrics more and more irritating. He comes off as a scold and a tightass and a know-it-all.

I guess as I get older and continue to see more and more subjectivity and circumstance and simple ignorance behind my own convictions/opinions, Andy's waterproof parquet theses get more alien to me.

Sorry if the above fails to make sense...

... makes sense to me!

An "acquired taste", really? I mean, Mark E Smith is most surely an acquired taste, but Andy's voice sounded golden to me the moment I heard him. Horses for courses and all that but sometimes I simply can't escape my own love for an artist to hear what others might dislike.

I have absolutely no problem with Andy or Colin's voices.

Jon - any specific lyrics you'd like to call out? I think many artists who write direct lyrics like Andy probably suffer from "gosh I wish I'd been more subtle or nuanced when I was younger".

I share your adoration of Mr. Hitchcock and he probabably escapes this by writing completely indirect lyrics, and the occasions when he is direct also might not sound so good 20 years later.

Man, now I have to do another traversal of the XTC catalog in order to back up my mouthing-off!

It's not really a prob for me when Andy's younger. I feel like it starts to worsen when they become studio-only and then more and more as he ages.

Robyn H, of course, has plenty of annoying lyrics himself, but with him it's a "really? You couldn't revise that couplet?" kind of thing. Or "really? You used someone's first name to pull off a rhyme AGAIN?"

Wow MaresNest that is a sweet link, thank you! When I was 19 I read probably every interview ever with XTC &/or its members, so it's fun to do that again but w/new stuff.

Jon, I hear you on Andy's lyrical tendencies-- tho I tend to associate them w/general insularity, and not necessarily that he thinks he knows it all. I actually suspect he's super humble, but awkward, and probably brainier than most of his friends. It's almost like he makes songs as toys (or "wishes", per that Emitt Rhodes interview from the other thread) for himself. OR PERHAPS I AM READING TOO MUCH INTO HIM :/

even if xtc never recorded another tune after "making plans for nigel", i'd still say wholly classic. got a Japanese reissue of English Settlement a few years ago - sound quality is v. nice on it...

I *get* that Andy's voice could be irritating, and especially that his lyrics might piss one off with their gee-whizness, but where it might bother me in other bands, it doesn't with XTC. (Some of his lyrics are nigh-unlistenable for me, esp. "Ladybird", "Toys" and "Books are Burning" but I can never hold their lapses against them somehow, and it doesn't feel like being indulgent, it feels like appreciating a band gestalt - like how "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" and "Piggies" are part and parcel of the Beatles and you don't stop loving them because they have a few pisspoor moments.) (And you know what? I hear Andy's "waterproof parquet theses" exactly as an expression of a subjective viewpoint, not as a Bono-esque "we can all save the world if YOU change your misguided ways!" finger-wag [with a couple exceptions] which is probably why I can tolerate them - he sounds to me like a guy wrestling with his conscience instead of a flag-waver)

This thread will probably cause me to traverse the XTC discog yet again. I love picking away at things that give me problems.

Thread made me bust out "English Settlement." It's one of those albums that took me years to fully get into. I had the same thing with "Songs in the Key of Life" – they're both so BIG and so GOOD. Like by the time "Jason and the Argonauts" is over I'm just drained.

Looking, at the tracks after that, actually, I can't remember any of them except "Fly on the Wall." I usually have a break after "Jason" because it's so damn epic, and I guess I never pick it back up. How weird.

Snowman has always been a fav of mine, still blast it when it comes up on my iPod

"Melt the Guns" is really embarrassing.

wtf it's 6:34!!!!

english settlement is pretty amazing all the way through

i said it on a different XTC thread once, but the beginning of "melt the guns" sounds like animal collective

Andy in social commentary mode can get pretty insufferable. I can't stand stuff like Melt the Guns and Books Are Burning, etc.

why do you love guns, shakey