The Agony and the XTC

This article was originally published in 1999.

XTC: Apple Venus, Volume 1
TVT/Idea 3250-2A

In the late Seventies I used to hang out at the New Wave club Legz (since razed to the ground as was inexorably inevitable). I'll never forget the night I first heard XTC's "Life Begins at the Hop"—an electrifying uptempo pop song fueled by jagged guitars and galvanic vocal harmonies. Since then, I've been hooked—XTC is truly one of rock's great bands, with brilliant songwriting and lyrics courtesy of Andy Partridge and Colin Moulding, astonishing, and I mean astonishing, arrangements featuring some of the finest—and quirkiest-guitar playing heard on this planet, and a scope of subject matter ranging from the most mundane to the most universal, all filtered through a uniquely English sensibility not unlike Ray Davies' and the Kinks'.

However, for the last seven years of bad luck, XTC has not released an album, because the band went on strike—no fooling—against their former record company, Virgin. Thanks to the formation of their own label, Idea Records, XTC has returned with the release of Apple Venus, Volume 1 (named after an obscure XTC reference, of which there are many).

And what a triumphant return it is. Apple Venus, Volume 1 is a towering masterpiece. It's the kind of completely-realized, coherent album you just don't hear anymore—an album in the tradition of Dark Side of the Moon or Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band or Aqualung, where it works as a distinct work of art in itself, total in its conception and completeness. It's also a unique departure for XTC in that it is an album featuring mostly orchestral and acoustic instrumentation. In place of the bold and bountiful electric guitars of Partridge and Dave Gregory (who left the band during the recording of this album), Apple Venus features lush strings, delicate pianos and sumptuous orchestrations.

Let's just say unlike other mediocre-to-miserable attempts at merging rock music and orchestras, this works brilliantly. It helps that the songs are among the finest Partridge and Moulding have ever written, even considering the band's previous amazingly high standards. There isn't a moment on the album that's anything less than captivating, from the first pizzicato string plucks and answering horns of "River of Orchids" to the giddy exhilaration of "I'd Like That" to the riveting "Easter Theatre." "Fruit Nut," about an English gardener, has become an anthem to me—"Every man must have a shed/To keep him sane" (for me it's my basement, aka The Musical Kingdom).

For some reason, this album defies my powers of description more than any other I've reviewed in these pages—I feel frustrated trying to convey this album's beauty and brilliance, power and subtlety, delicacy and drama. I am simply floored by the sardonic wit and wordplay of "Your Dictionary," written while Partridge was divorcing his ex-wife—perhaps the cleverest use of profanity in a pop song ever (I don't want to spell it out for you here).

The sound quality is extremely good, though you won't mistake it for a Living Presence or Living Stereo. The tonal balance is rich and smooth, weighted toward the bass with a slight high-end rolloff. Detail resolution is very good though not top-notch, and there's some dynamic compression, particularly during densely-orchestrated parts. The mix is excellent, with a realistic sense of instrumental placement and separation in a well-crafted soundspace, although somewhat lacking in depth. Some of the vocals are processed, but not egregiously so. Nevertheless, the overall sound is inviting, with a pleasing, natural quality.

For those of you who want your XTC electric, Apple Venus Volume 2 will follow later in the year, featuring electric guitars and instrumentation. Here and now, I'm telling you, run, don't walk, and check out this extraordinary album.

Spookey Ruben: What's A Boy to Do?
TVT SP-3270

Great googly moogly, what a fantastic album this is! Once again, a CD spun at me from out of the proverbial blue turns out to be a shockingly satisfying surprise.

After sending me a copy of the Apple Venus album, TVT's Jason Consoli, for whatever reason (maybe it was the fact that when we first met, I joked that the sound of workmen pounding on pipes sounded like the sessions for a new Kraftwerk album), thought I might like this album by Toronto's Spookey Ruben, a twenty-something writer-producer-engineer-singer-musician-et al.

Like? Like? Like, I flipped over this record! Man alive, this record is, like, amazing! Picture me jumping up and down right now—I'm getting worked up just thinking about it, and since I got this record, I have to have more and more of it-I think I now may know how crack addicts must feel.

What's A Boy to Do? is a wild, exhilarating melange of styles and sounds, colliding, blending together, copulating and producing bizarre, mutated offspring. Take the first track, "Sex Traffic," (gotta be an homage to Kraftwerk's Sex Object")—a dizzying mix of French female vocal samples, snapping synthesizers, rubber-band ostinato bass, gritty electronic drums, sampled squealing tires and robotic monotonous vocals intoning "Sex Traffic" over it all—but it's freakin' fantastic! Then before you've recovered, Ruben jump-cuts into "My Female Friends," its gorgeous piano chords, buoyant vocal and synth melodies and galloping rhythm three minutes and forty-four seconds of pure pop adrenaline. The record is a roller coaster thrill-ride of moods and kaleidoscopic instrumental sounds, from unbelievably pure and well-recorded acoustic guitars, glockenspiels and percussion to unbelievably processed squealing synths and sampled vocals. Actually, some of the sounds are completely unrecognizable.

Yet it all works, and for a reason: Spookey Ruben writes wonderful songs with hummable, memorable melodies. (At least on this album, his second—his previous album, Modes of Transportation: Volume One is far less accessible.) "Favourite Movie" is slinky and seductive, "Why Did I Do What I Did" features an irresistible sing-song chorus courtesy of the female backup singers, and "N. Kinski" is a hysterical ode to rainy days and Nastassia Kinski that must be heard to be believed. A poor analogy to Boy would be Beck's Odelay album—poor because, although Ruben is able to make a melting pot of wildly diverse stylistic elements work together the same way Beck does, What's A Boy to Do? sounds nothing like Odelay.

The sound is terrific—dynamic, detailed, with taut, kickin' bass and an excellent tonal balance without any perceived "peaks" or "dips" (lord knows there's gotta be some because the mix shifts around at times like a drunk on the deck of the Titanic). As mentioned, some of the acoustic instruments sound remarkably real, especially Ruben's guitar playing. And the sounds that aren't deliberately grungy are clean, clean, clean. At times, the vocals have an upper-midrange edge, but what the hell.

It must be pointed out that the sound has what I'm starting to think of as a "Pro Tools"-made-in-a-computer kind of sonic veneer about it. That is, a certain clinical cleanliness that comes from mixing on a hard disk or project studio digital recorder that sounds kind of like the way the steak tasted in the movie The Fly after Jeff Goldblum sent it through an unperfected version of the matter transmitter—strangely, subtly but detectably altered. Nevertheless, in the context of the music, this sonic effect actually works to advantage.

But the thing that takes this album over the top, the thing that takes it from merely wonderful to stupendous, is the song "Someone Else." A stone-cold, bona fide, no-holds-barred pop masterpiece, "Someone Else" simply soars the same way songs like "She's Gone" by Hall and Oates or Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven" or Diana Ross' version of "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" do—its dazzling melody and harmonies and lush arrangement captivates and just goes and goes and goes. Most of the times I hear this album—which has been pretty much every day since I got it—I have to play this song over and over a few times before I can move to the next track.

Mind-numbing. The kid's a genius.

Joe Henry: Trampoline
Mammoth Records 92686-2

Jon Valin told me I hadda hear this one and oh man, he was right.

I'd never heard of Joe Henry—my loss 'till now—although the man has four albums listed on cdnow.com, so obviously he's been around. It sure sounds it on this album of strangely compelling songs sung in Henry's strangely compelling voice. I admit after repeated hearings, I still don't "get" most of his lyrics, stark elucidations of Henry's private, oblique world-view—yet I get the feeling of the songs, which grab me by the gut every time. When Henry sings, "But this time I'm not coming down/This time I'm not coming down" on the title track, it feels so triumphant, so liberating, such a defiant slap in the face of the day-to-day ordinariness of life it's one of the most thrilling moments ever recorded. (I know that doesn't come across on paper the way it should. Trust me, it's electrifying.)

The stark instrumentation is a unique combination and contrast of conventional-sounding guitars-bass-drums-keyboards and hyper-distorted washes of twisted electric guitar, courtesy of Page Hamilton of the ultra-hard rock band Helmet. While there is some track to track variation and at times the electric bass is somewhat indistinct (maybe it was deliberately recorded and mixed that way), the sonics are extremely good overall. On the best tracks, the sound is rich and solid (dig the way the sound builds on "Ohio Air Show Plane Crash"), with excellent bass punch and wallop on the drums, a firm and fleshed-out midrange and an airy upper-midrange and top-end.

The exceptional drum sound must be singled out. My friend and drummer extraordinaire Paul Rapp once told me he thought a great drum sound makes a record, and that sometimes simply a great snare drum sound can be the key to a hit record. Paul, you'd love this record—the drum sound is big and open, yet focused, with exceptional transient snap and a feeling of "reality," body and dynamic power. On this record, every note counts, and the mix works to bring the music to life, with excellent separation and delineation and instruments and vocals well-placed in a wide and moderately deep (could be deeper) soundspace.

Like many musically rewarding albums, this record doesn't hit you at first—it insinuates itself slowly, almost sneakily. Dark, brooding, demanding attention—the Backstreet Boys or some other disposable pop-fluff commodity this ain't—the more you hear Trampoline, the more you want to hear it again.

Lucinda Williams: Car Wheels on A Gravel Road
Mercury 314 558 338-2

In the March, 1999 Best Pop Records of 1998, an astonishing 7 out of 11 pop music reviewers (not counting me) picked Lucinda Williams' Car Wheels on A Gravel Road as one of their three best albums of the year. Hearing this, I can hear why. This is one of the most fully-realized, emotionally powerful, moving and just plain right-sounding records I've ever heard, with stunning songwriting accompanied by the kind of musicianship and arrangements that just fit into a perfect whole. Drawing from country, rock, folk, blues and much more, even the "depressing" songs are somehow uplifting. And I'm surprised no one mentioned that the leadoff track, "Right In Time," is one of the most erotically-charged songs ever recorded—when Williams sings, "oh, baby, the way you move is right in time," an actual physical adrenaline thrill shoots through my body.

The sound is quite good, tonally warm and a clean, rich recording, though dynamically compressed and lacking top end air and sparkle. To make up for it, the bass is weighty and punchy, with great, well, kick on the kick drum. It's the kind of recording that "tells" you it's digital, though not egregiously so—on some songs, depth is lacking and an upper-midrange hardness creeps into the mix. Still, Williams' voice is inviting, and some of the tremoloed electric guitar tones are heavenly, a fabulous combination of twang and body. This time, the critics are right—don't miss this.