ive tried a bunch of time to listent o and like this album, and I think that now ive listened to the other 80s things—psych furs and suchlike---I can
Partridge is funny cause he lsot his shit snd started just writing like ‘be happy fuck yeah ungh be ok ‘ because he was a brittle aging out of youth bro instead of a ‘society is FUCKED ,man, angry young man like graham parker/joe Jackson.
I like the multiplied, wheeeew weeeew wwwweeeewww guitar in garden of earthly delights, the lyrics are silly in a go2 type of way. Conscious post beatles
Mayor of simpleton a take on ‘don’t know much about hsitory’. tv show song like robyn hitchcock's 'man who invented himself' but not as good a show-- i totally love that song/artist, by the way. Gay candy colored late 80s doctor who, like how sylvestre mccoy looks externally w/ the question mark motif. Good doubling of vocal, takes one of the best early elvis features and applies xtc to it. Very bouncy, cruisey
[mrrrrrr, as oswald cobblepot, im completely externally invalid, here's some knockout gas from my fuckin umbrella or some shit, i dunno]
I like the cover a lot, but I always have
Here comes president kill again is a good thing just because of the title. It eats kind o like a less good ‘dear god’, which I get, but Reagan was so easy that its shitty to shamble so Robert smith-y [I assume, only having seen the cure at coachellz 2k9 and not listened to them] horns are a good ' mancini 60s ' bit, as is low voice(good bit, that is)—makes me think of the name harry nillson, even though im not imlyng a connection.
Poor skeleton steps out is good, doing a bit of a nearly Africa sequel with the graceand bwoom, bwoom, and the ribcage xylophone. I see how this hsit sounded teletubby to me in other contexts though. If you weren’t following the 80s as a cultural thing, and rather just xtc alone, this could be a disappointment in light of the more directly abrasive and subversive emotionality of the earler work—the softening of the bearded 30s-dad type we now see as that one bald comedian in the Toyota minivan commercials
Andy partridge is kind of insufferable, but when he was cool you didn’t mind as much.
Merely a man doesn’t even have the potency of dear god’s earnest structure-and-nostalgia-refuting primacy [via childvoice]. Good jimmy swaggert namedrop though
‘help me get through my cynical days/these cynical days’ shut up man that’s dumb ‘its justa passing phase’ ‘years go by’ its like the damn late enlightenment, all ‘eugh the countryside ruled, peasants, shit yeah’ but that is even cool because its part of a grnd tradition that in that context turned into pastoral romanticism, which rules on both countries’ fronts—us and Britain
across ths antheap is pretty good. I like the guitar behind the vocal and the ssynths. I also like the way he growls ‘orgasms fade’ because that’s what he shouldve gotten out of the 80s, I really think andy partridge shouldve gone more directly sexual in response to that decade than he did, but I guess breakdowns are pretty unsexy, so he got at what was happening via emotion rather than moralizing, based as it is in the self rather than, y’know, not.
It is one of the better songs on the album, fosh
Whoop; ‘hold me my daddy’ damn it partridge your perspective is not cool, I really wish you hadn’t freaked out so goddamn hard. ’It hurts to see grown men fighting this way’, like I get that antiwar is a thing, generals and majors and all, but that was based in the subjects, like jello biafra’s songwriting a little, whereas this is all navelgazy in a tiresome way. That’s even a cool African guitar thing with the vocals there after the fake ending, legit pre-vampweekend/postgraceland exploitation, but it doesn’t save the lyrical issues
Pink thing is good. Its really funny as a dick joke/infant conflation, that’s a good use of yr talents, andy, and also it has all the good guitar work and jaunty handclaps and falsettos you could want. Another false ending/shift for a fadeout
Miniature sun isn’t that interesting right after pink thing, bit of a steely dan supertramp thing. ‘vain little boy I was’ nah man, youre just creating a narrative of personal growth via crisis when your coolest shit was what you lost in the breakup
Chalkhills and children is a good song too, doing a very convincing brian Wilson, esp on the fadeout
IN CONCLUSION NOW THAT THE ALBUMS OVER:
Decent, not the best work, Stephen Thomas erlewine at allmusic doesn’t get patridge in the same way I do, the best parts of skylarking were the unexpected and emotionally off, twitchy elements, like he says ‘grass’ is purely a positive song, and ‘big day’ is a celebration of marriage, which is completely inexplicable to me. Actually allmusic has always bugged me re: xtc, because the other bro who reviewed the earler albums panned go2 and gave white music 3 stars and a 1 paragraph dismissal, which is shitty to do. Like drums and wires is good, yeah, but like white music at least is fantastic in the same way ultravox!’s ha! ha! ha! is. Course I never liked post-foxx ultravox anyway, gonna have to give at least Vienna another shot bc I like the title track at least—‘it means nothing to me’ with that piano thing is really great. Also gonna have to deal w/scritti politti on its own terms(ie outside the 'early material' political-ass thing i got) via cupid and psyche certainly and white bread black beer maybe—that one just bc I like ‘dr abernathy’ a lot, though ‘boom boom bap’ and the ‘middle-aged guy in his kitchen’ of it make me wary of it.
Oranges and lemons iss gonna get added to my ipod, it has finally won me over as much as it can, I think.
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