XTC : Classic or Dud.

Umm I think my relationship with music hopefully involves less "searching" artists' catalogs for things I'm looking for, and more trying to take note of what's actually there

Did anyone buy the remasters when they came out in, what, 2001? Was it that much of an improvement over the original CDs?

In the case of the Steve Lillywhite productions, they sound considerably better.

Plus having all those bonus tracks at the end of the album is a lot better than having them in the middle.

They were in the middle? Sheesh!

Yeah, Virgin put them in the middle of everything from White Music to Big Express.

the CD versions I have of the Dukes, Mummer, and English Settlement are like half as loud as most of the other CDs in my collection. its really odd.

My English Settlement (Virgin, 72 min) is definitely louder, but heavy on the midrange. I had to manually bring it down a couple of decibels for my ipod.

Sorry to just jump in, but this is an unmissable opportunity for me to moan about the fact that the booklets in the remasters print the lyrics in such tiny type as to be, for all intents and purposes, illegible. why? did no-one bother to try reading what they'd just designed? i find this annoying because i know the lyrics are likely to be good, but some are very hard to decipher.

you could try listening to what he is singing

the booklets in the remasters print the lyrics in such tiny type as to be, for all intents and purposes, illegible. why?

Are they reprints of the LP packaging?

the nonsuch remaster, admittedly, has tiny reprints of the original lyric-sheets, but hey, the words are there IN YOUR EARS

Which is the Raft reissue with the back cover printed all wonky? Is it Nonsuch?

It is not like Andy Partridge of Colin Moulding have cookie-monster vocals.

*digs out copy* YES IT IS. Absolute idiocy.

It is not like Andy Partridge of Colin Moulding have cookie-monster vocals.

he really shake you donkey up
he really make you donkey up
he really shake you donkey up quite a packet

me lost me cookie at the disco
me lost me cookie in the booooo-gie muuuu-sic
me lost me cookie at the disco
me want it back he want it back me want it back again

MARK THE DIFFERENCE FOR ME MARK IT PLEASE

Come to think of it, the last verse of 'Complicated Game' is fairly larynx-shredding.

Have been on my regular semi-decade XTC non-stop rampage of late. Am somewhat befuddled by the general lack of love for them on these boards (and, well, pretty much everywhere, but it is extra-surprising here, since they bridge rock & pop perfectly; also the visceral and the cerebral) - Am I the only person here who considers them hands down the best British band since the Beatles? Because I do. Maybe that's the rarest opinion I actually possess...

>Black Sea is distilled fun.
Oh yeah, Almanac: "Travels in Nihilon" is a cotton-candy paradise! :)

White Music and Go 2 are good but not stellar - great singles, as others have noted - I generally get all I need of this period from the Transistor Blast and Coat of Many Cupboards sets. Drums & Wires & Black Sea are front-to-back brilliant. I mean, really, just everybody should own them. English Settlement loses me a little bit; it could be that a better mastering job would reclaim it for me, but the sonic oomph just isn't there (compare the version of "No Thugs" on ES to the one on Transistor Blast). Still, more brilliance packed into that album than most anything you'd want to name. Mummer and Big Express lose me - Andy gets precious and lots of lyrical lapses, middling-poor production on both records, a sense of trying to find their way after deciding not to tour anymore. The Dukes, Skylarking, Oranges & Lemons, and even the maligned Nonsuch are virtually unimpeachable for me - the soggy bits are more than mopped up by the towering greatness of the better material. And, of course, there's a nostalgia factor (the music you heard when you were 15 years old, yadda yadda), but I'd consider about 90% of those albums essential.

Nonsuch is a frankly brilliant album full of brilliant songs that came out at exactly the wrong time. Quite sad, really.― Just got offed OTM.

The final pair of albums promised so much for their next phase. I even love Wasp Star (it's better on vinyl, if you can get hold of it - the mastering is so much less brassy and compressy). They extended both sides of the XTC that I loved: perfect pop songs ("The Man Who Murdered Love" is an example of Andy allowing himself to get simple, with I think great results, despite its sounding as though someone besides Andy could have written it [his earlier songs are utterly idiosyncratic - which, by the way, I think is a better descriptor for the band than "quirky" is]) alongside more complex material (the rondelle of "River of Orchids", the multipart cobbled-together structure of "Maypole", the "Snowman"-esque polyrhythm of "You & the Clouds"). These albums contain Moulding's finest bass playing, if not his finest songs. Had the critical and (especially) commercial reception not been so miserable XTC might have squeezed out another couple of records, and who knows, they might even have been very good ones. But all good bands must come to an end. I continue to listen, and to bore folks silly banging on about them to anyone who'll indulge me.

So, um, dud, obv.

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!