FFWD Weekly
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| CD Review by FFWD Staff XTC • Two discs of live tracks, and two with the studio sessions the seminal English pop band recorded for BBC radio. • Packaged in a box which resembles a transistor radio and includes sparse liner notes from XTC’s songwriters Andy Partridge and Colin Moulding. If the Beatles invented the pop song, XTC perfected it. Eleven full-length studio albums (including one as their alter-ego The Dukes of Stratosphear) spanning two decades has resulted in the accumulation of countless unforgettable melodies, genius turns-of-phrases and brilliant songwriting exercises from the band’s two central figures, Andy Partridge and Colin Moulding. Due to a lengthy and painful – for fans, especially – divorce from their longtime label, Virgin, the last album of new material to come from the XTC camp was 1992’s Nonsuch. With that messiness now behind them, they’ve signed to the much smaller TVT label, and on September 3 of this past year finished recording a new CD. Unfortunately, that album, a lush acoustic and orchestral recording along the lines of Mummer, titled Apple Venus (Volume 1), won’t be released until March 3 (the more pop rock Volume 2 is scheduled for fall), but in the meantime, TVT has made available four discs worth of recordings from the British Broadcasting Corporation’s vaults. Transistor Blast: The Best of the BBC Sessions brings together a great cross section of the band’s work from their inception in the late ’70s to 1989’s Oranges and Lemons. Two of the discs are devoted to tracks culled from live shows recorded by the BBC – the first mixes two separate shows from ’77 and ’79, the second CD is an entire show recorded at London’s Hammersmith Palais in December of 1980 (and previously available as a single CD on import) – and the remaining two feature songs from the various studio sessions they did for The John Peel and Kid Jensen shows over the course of a decade (many of which are also available on the Drums and Wireless import). The live tracks are a revelation, a window into a side of the band that hasn’t come through in their studio work since 1979’s Drums and Wires. There’s an indelible sense of urgency – a sound most would coin new wave – and fun to the material that often supersedes, but doesn’t detract from, the band’s uncanny melodicism. At times, Partridge’s frenetic Spitfire vocal delivery dispenses with every consonant and careens through amphetamined versions of familiar tunes (his singing of "All Along the Watchtower" is even more unintelligible than Dylan’s). Upon hearing XTC live, it’s hard – and painful – to imagine that this is a band that – due to Partridge’s stage fright (!?) – hasn’t toured since the early ’80s. For the most part, the studio reworkings don’t improve upon their album blueprints, differing only enough to make them of interest to XTC completists who might dig the extra spring in the steps of two of the English Settlement tracks – "Snowman" and "Jason and the Argonauts" – or the added Andy vocals on the intro to "Another Satellite." There’s also the bonus pleasure of being reminded of their quirky and obtuse side via non-single album tracks like "I’m Bugged" and "Meccanic Dancing." Transistor Blast is definitely not a good introduction to the last great pop band by any means – if you’re after that there’s a two-disc best-of called Fossil Fuel. Instead, it’s a rather nice thank you to XTC faithful for their patience, and further argument for their prominent placing when the final book is written on 20th century popular music history. 4/5 Mike Bell |
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