 |
 |
 |
|
I believe the reason that British pop band XTC is still fairly obscure in America after 15 years is because they're relentlessly uncool. That is, uncool in a flashy, trend-of-the-minute, American way. Perhaps XTC's inability or unwillingness to jump on the fashion bandwagon at any point during their career accounts for the fact that their albums, going as far back as 1979's Drums and Wires, sound as fresh today as they did when they were originally released. Fresh, if not necessarily cool. XTC has bestowed upon an indifferent marketplace yet another catchy collection of original pop recordings, called Nonsuch (Geffen), their 10th album of new material. It's typical XTC: after three playings, I was singing along; after four, the various tunes were replaying incessantly in my head. Along with its unremitting catchiness, the disc is typical in another respect: the songs are all over the map both in style and sentiment. Clanging rockers like "The Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead" and "Crocodile" lie alongside somber ballads like "Humble Daisy" and "Wrapped in Grey." Check out the neopsychedelia of "That Wave" (psychedelia bubbles under the surface of the entire album) or the loopy theatrics of "Bungalow." Lyrically, songwriters Andy Partridge and Colin Moulding manage to be euphorically optimistic and stridently cynical, in turns. They make up for occasionally toppling polemical straw men by sharing their giddiness about life and love and love lost. (Giddy about love lost? Only XTC could get away with a first-person lament by a cuckolded circus clown, as in the peppy "Dear Madame Barnum.") If you can forget about how unfashionable XTC's retro pop is (I have often thought that if the '60s had never happened, Andy Partridge would have had to become a poet), this 17-song, hour-long collection offers extraordinary pleasures.
What marketing genius approved this? There's a group out there called The Men, which, apparently, has just released its debut album. I haven't heard it. I just though you might like to know about The Men. And of course, in a typical '90s-nihilism sort of way, two of The Men are women. Duh. |
|
