A selection of album
reviews, Wasp Star onwards.
Sources indicated where known.
Wasp Star, Pulse Magazine -
June 2000
(contributed by Ian Alterman)
Why isn't XTC the biggest band on the planet? No other current group has picked up the baroque-rock gauntlet thrown down by the late-period Beatles, and XTC has been at it since the late '70s. Perhaps it's because this resolutely English band recalls another great auld-sod combo whose relative obscurity in America remains mystifying: the Kinks. At this point, it'd be hard to imagine XTC - essentially a vehicle for songwriters Andy Partridge and Colin Moulding - making a lousy record. Wasp Star supposedly contains the harder-edged material developed at the same time as the flowery music on last year's brilliant Apple Venus. I dunno; it's as sharp-turning, smirky, tuneful and brainy as ever. Sure, Partridge's "Playground" and "Stupidly Happy" are built on repetitive riffs, but AC/DC this isn't. And the other cuts ("Church of Women," "We're All Light," Moulding's winning "In Another Life," plus seven more) are pretty swell, too. Maybe not Skylarking or English Settlement swell, but Oranges & Lemons nifty - at least.
(Three-and-a-half out of four stars).
Jackson Griffith
Wasp Star, NoneForYouDear - June 2000
It's one of the weird side effects of being unstintingly brilliant in the public eye for a very, very long time: said public begins to accept said brilliance as a given, kind of humdrum in a way, and many will yowl for their money back if the earth doesn't tilt off its axis at 9:00 AM on Tuesday when the new album hits Tower. I have been guilty of taking Andy Partridge for granted over the last decade or so, in that it's generally taken four listens to each new album before I begin to grasp the breadth of his latest achievement. I remember cleaning my house while I was in the fourth spin around last year's "Apple Venus Vol. 1" and suddenly stopping, mid-vacuum, and realizing that not only was the album making me feel exactly the same way that The Beatles' "Magical Mystery Tour" album makes me feel, but that I was loving "AV V.1" just as much. And now comes "Wasp Star," the other side of the "Apple Venus" mirror, and one so seemingly unassuming in its ambition that I was more than happy on first listen to simply embrace it as Andy having a sweet old time, him digging being the only guitarist on his own record after a couple of decades of the priceless and now-departed-from-the-band Dave Gregory intimidating him, playing simple tunes that didn't necessarily require months of studio time to perfect, and continuing to loudly proclaim his undying lust and gratitude for his long-kept-in-waiting lady love. All of which sent a big smile to the front of my head, but not necessarily gallons of awe screaming through my nervous system.
Hit "play." Be greeted by a startlingly simple (for our deviously clever Andy) guitar riff, tent pegs of the groove pounded firmly into the ground by the brute force of the opening drum fills, splashing open into the type of melody which may seem obvious (if you're listening wrong, as judgmental bastards like me often do on the first go) but isn't, which actually, by now, is such a welcome part of my life, as is this entire album. In fact, I need to actually hit "play" right now...
...you see, this just FEELS so good right now (I'm speaking, by the way, of the song "Playground," the first song from the album "Wasp Star (Apple Venus Vol. 2)" by XTC, this group that I like a lot). And every song on this album, in addition to being filled with life- and language-loving lyrics and rich, intricate, music-loving music, has got at least one THING, one of those moments which is just so sweet to listen to that you just can't wait until --- and there it is! Andy's lovely multi-tracked daughter Holly nyaah-nyaahing "Playground! Playground! Careful what you say ground!" Man, if you can listen to that and not grin, and then not be delighted by the return of that by-now completely essential verse melody and then not in turn grin even more widely - uh, just don't talk to me right now.
Consider "My Brown Guitar" (latest entry in the subgenre of "Andy sings about his penis," and bursting with happy love energy. While bassist/vocalist/songwriter Colin Moulding continues his wholly worthy and charming work of finding elemental poetry in every seemingly mundane cranny of middle aged married life - how many pop songwriters find value in that as a subject? - Andy now occupies both grounds on either side: 1) the horny old adolescent, delighted almost beyond breath to find himself in love again, a moony, idealistic wall of semen, and 2) the extraordinarily bitter dumped husband [after last album's shocking "Your Dictionary," now witness this album's self-pitying "Wounded Horse," probably the low point here, not necessarily redeemed by corny clip-clop sound effects, rendered somewhat appealing by its harrumphing precisely-sloppy-guitar slowish blues groove {although Andy's sadistically slow "Blue Overall" accomplished this in a vastly more satisfying way}, but certainly rendered car-crash fascinating by Andy's drunken-Nilsson vocal delivery, and any and all reservations rendered utterly, utterly moot anyway by the next three amazing songs which close out the album with breathtaking confidence and joy and triumph. Yep]. If it seems unseemly that Andy is still smarting so loudly in the aftermath of his divorce, it's worth remembering that all of these songs have been gestating for over half a decade (and that the closing number here, the impossibly perfect "The Wheel And The Maypole," counteracts the bitter aftertaste of "Wounded Horse" by taking an entirely more healthy and life-affirming overview of the entire experience of divorce). But it will be a subject well worth avoiding when he decides it's time to start writing again, mostly for his own good but for ours as well. Anyway, what was I about to say about "My Brown Guitar"): I really love the background vocals in the verses. Sorry, I'd planned to say more about them, but after that distended parenthetical aside I lost a bit of steam. Lemme turn "My Brown Guitar" back on...
Ahhhhhh. No need to say much more than that, really.
But I'll say more anyway: Andy Partridge once said, in one of his very many interviews (the lad can talk at least as copiously as I can write), that his avowed purpose as a pop songsmith is to make music so good that it actually hurts to hear it. "Wasp Star" may not be as ecstatically painful as "Black Sea" or "Oranges & Lemons" or "Drums and Wires," but let's remember that it is, in a very real sense, half an album, and should be taken in tandem with last year's "Apple Venus Vol. 1" (the 23 songs on both volumes were written and developed at approximately the same time and, at one point, planned as a 2-CD set). "AV Vol. One" is stuffed absurdly full with some of the most lustrous, lush, generous music you can imagine, slices of heaven which just sound damn nifty. So a few days ago I loaded both "Apple Venuses" into the multi-changer and hit shuffle, and even though my player locked into a seriously pro-Colin mode and served up four Moulding sides in a row (which was surprisingly effective! A revelation), all the songs slide in and out of each other wonderfully well. The "Apple Venus Shuffle Manuever" will deliver to you an infinite number of albums, any one of which is two to seven times as good as The Beach Boys' "Smile" would have been, and I recommend the maneuver highly.
Oh. A very lovely thing about XTC is the sheer volume of plastic they generate when they kick into an active season. Since 1998's "Transistor Blast" BBC sessions set (4 oh so scintillating CDs, slick with nostalgia tears) there've been two new studio albums, a home-demo version of one of them, CD singles with bonus tracks and interviews, promo items - and I'm ninny enough to actually enjoy stacking them up and gawking at them like a first time visitor to Metropolis - look at all them CDs, maw! I guess what I'm trying to say is that XTC make me very, very happy, and I'm a grateful, dizzy fan and always will be.
Oh. I'm just now noticing, for the first time, the stereo keyboard solos at the end of "We're All Light." So sweet. SO sweet.
Mike Keneally
Wasp Star, Old Punks Web Zine - June 2000
So this is the as promised great return to former great guitar XTC greatness? Not exactly, if not at all. If Apple Venus Vol. 1 was less an orchestral album than a return to the formula that made Skylarking so memorable, Wasp Star (aka Apple Venus Vol. 2) is a studied recycling of songs from Nonsuch and Oranges and Lemons. The results are much better but almost as uneven.
Early XTC records were fairly consistent in their quality. Starting with Mummer in 1983, Andy Partridge lost his love of kinetic playfulness and settled into recording a few single-worthy songs surrounded by slow, pastoral Beatlesque tunes. Producer Todd Rundgren had to battle all of Andy's miscalculations and panicked childishness to make Skylarking, an album that revitalized the band's reputation to no end. Andy hated Todd for it, and he recorded Oranges and Lemons, a mostly bland record, as a 2 record set, maybe as overcompensation for Rundgren's temporary retooling of Andy's plan of built-in obsolescence.
When guitarist Dave Gregory exited over creative differences, I figured nobody was left to keep Andy's impulses in check, and the next XTC record would be their worst and probably last. Colin's a hero of mine but I see him as Dave Davies to Andy's Ray Davies. To my shock and surprise, Apple Venus Vol. 1 was a great record and a humble acknowledgment that Todd was right and Andy was wrong. Wasp Star, to have been effective and consistent with how it was promoted, should have harked back to at least English Settlement. I think a return to the aesthetics of Drums and Wires would have elicited orgasmic spasms of joy from the music press and rekindled a Renaissance of interest in pre-disco New Wave (a personal dream of mine).
What you really have with the new CD is a studied analysis of what worked and didn't work on Nonsuch and Oranges and Lemons. While not a great record, Wasp Star is still very good.
I won't hold it against Andy that he's recycling riffs left and right from past hits, especially "Mayor Of Simpleton" and "The Ballad Of Peter Pumpkinhead". Listening to this the 1st time, I spent most of the time smacking my head wondering where I heard this and that melody or chorus before. Colin continues his beautiful march to beerhall-Noel Coward-Ray Davies nirvana. Here's how the songs fare:
"Playground" - a big, slow electrified acoustic guitar riff. The cuteness of the child-sung chorus in the middle is offset by the fact that it's Andy's own daughter. Thats makes it really sweet as long as she got cash out of the deal. "Stupidly Happy" - dig that Rolling Stones guitar, an inversion of "Start Me Up". Undig that 1/8th rap singing and side-step shuffle groove. Nice addition of a second guitar in the middle after the lyric "Form the strings of a big guitar." This should be a big hit on the college stations. "In Another Life" - Colin, a personal god, continues to write for the same unproduced stage musical he began with Apple Venus Vol. 1. Colin's a big sentimental softie and so am I. Another soft shoe, top hat and cane classic. He wrote this song to his wife, who suffered a long-term illness. That's love, baby! "My Brown Guitar" - put me out of my misery and tell me what earlier XTC song Andy's ripping off. "Boarded Up" - I thought it was Andy who wrote about buildings as if they were people, but Colin penned this. Noel Coward lives! "I'm The Man Who Murdered Love" - a computer figured out how to make a hit song, manufacturing what should have been titled "The Ballad of Mayor Peter Simpleton". "We're All Light" - a sequel to "Greenman", this is a very buoyant tune that would work well in a Disney cartoon. A very happy number, in the best sense of the term. "Standing In For Joe" - Colin, 3 for f--king 3! Lyrically this is Beatles meets Ray Davies meets Kate Bush. A story you can act out in your mind while you listen. Colin, baby, time to branch out and produce that stage musical that's mutating inside of you like the monster in Alien. "Wounded Horse" - John Lennon's dead but he lives on in Andy's pen and guitar. "You And The Clouds Will Still Be Beautiful" - the horn section is another rehash, but otherwise this is very good groove music. "Church Of Women" - Dub reggae with ukulele? Uninvolving yet kinda interesting. Nice to hear Andy play with his voice again. "The Wheel And The Maypole" - a peppy little tune, but I was hoping they'd go out with a bang, like how "Funk Pop A Roll" closed Mummer, evoking Elvis Costello stopping "Alison" on SNL to tear into "Radio Radio".
Emerson Schiff
Wasp Star, Billboard - 27 May 2000
1999's "Apple Venus Volume 1" heralded the return of XTC to the world of recorded music and indulged the more orchestral side of band mainstays Andy Partridge and Colin Moulding. Conversely, "Wasp Star (Apple Venus Volume 2)" plays squarely to the band's formidable and more familiar guitar pop chops and layered lush harmonies.
Partridge and Moulding are continually overjoyed and crushed by their entanglements with love. On "Wasp Star..." their struggles are all played out on a harmonious electric guitar-driven landscape reminiscent of 1992's "Nonsuch," but more fully realized, no doubt due to the relaxed atmosphere of recording in Moulding's home studio during the band's prolonged legal entanglements with its former label.
Nine of the album's dozen songs were written by Partridge, and each unfolds like an act of a melodious Shakespearean play -- lyrics drenched in imagery and metaphor, plots twisting through the experience of love and betrayal. These are the songs that sound like "typical" XTC, with their layered harmonies intertwined with wonderfully simple melodies. Moudling's three offerings are more straightforward, yet only "Standing In For Joe" rings with the instant aural pleasures of Partridge's winsome arrangements.
The album leads off with the upbeat "Playground," which looks at love with the sour realization that we indeed learn all we need to know in life in kindergarten. From there, true gems are found in the drowning-in-love bliss of the bouncy "Stupidly Happy" and diverse, ear-catching choruses of "The Wheel And The Maypole"; others are discovered as pathetic pick up lines strung together in "We're All Light," and the snide boasts of "The Man Who Murdered Love."
The delightful swirling pop circus does come to rest several times, most notably with "Wounded Horse," Partridge's plodding lament of the discovery of a lover's indiscretion. Further respite comes from Moulding's "Boarded Up," as well as Partridge's overtly George Harrison-esque "My Brown Guitar."
For over two decades, the simple pleasures of XTC have often remained undiscovered by the masses. But after all these years, "Wasp Star..." shows that Partridge and Moulding are still up to creating music on par with the best of their past.
Barry A. Jeckell
Wasp Star, Teletext, C4 North East - 23 May 2000
The Songwriting duo of Andy Partridge and Colin Moulding return to their traditional prime, rather than copying 1999's experimental Apple Venus album.
The highest praise that can be lavished on Wasp Star is that all 12 tracks could have come from their singles collection - the choruses are big enough to live in.
Back when Blur still did pop, they got Andy Partridge do the demos, betcha their next album doesn't have anything as joyful as this.
8/10
John Earle
Wasp Star, Birdpages - May 2000
Andy Partridge needs to fall in love more often. Producing two of their best albums since Skylarking the duo of Partridge and Colin Moulding have produced two albums that can proudly hold their own against the band’s back catalog. If not for Virgin Records we would have had these two outstanding works eight years sooner.
Listening to Wasp Star (a reference to the Inca’s name for Venus) I can’t but help thing that most of the songs are among the most infectious melodies Partridge and Moulding have written. Much as been made of the band’s debt to the Beatles but it seems to me that both songwriters owe a greater debt to one of rock’s best songwriters Ray Davies and the sound of the Kinks. The album gets off to a grand start with Playground. The pun in the title (along with Andy’s analogy of the playground as a microcosm of the adult world) is as elegant as anything Ray Davies has written. Stupidly Happy shimmers with a delightful melody and a stuttering guitar riff that hooks the listener within the first few seconds. The single chord progression captures the simplicity of newfound love. Moulding has often played Dave to Andy’s Ray Davies. While Moulding is less prolific his songs (like Dave Davies) are every bit the equal of Andy’s best material. Moulding’s bouncy In Another Life would have sounded right at home on any of the Kinks late 60’s or early 70’s albums. Moulding (again like the Davies brothers) glorifies those wonderful moments in ordinary life we all take for granted. My Brown guitar reminds me of George Harrison or Paul McCartney at their peak (whoops—there’s that darn Beatles connection coming up yet again. Talk about contradicting yourself). I love the unusual opening of the song (it actually sounds like the end of another song collided with this tune. If it was an accident, it’s a beautiful one. It reflects Partridge’s usual preoccupation (“I suppose it’s about sex when all is said and done”) despite the impressionistic quality of the lyrics.
Moulding’s Boarded Up reminds me of his best material from before Skylarking. The song has an edgy quality that has always informed some of his best work. Partridge’s I’m The Man Who Murdered Love sounded extremely clumsy in the demo stage and wasn’t the most promising sounding track. The Wasp Star arrangement has a slightly different tempo and the fleshed out arrangement made me realize I had underestimated this song. The lyrics are both hilarious and dark.
I don’t worship Church of Women. It didn’t fire up my imagination like some of the other selections on the album did. It might be one of those tunes that I’ll suddenly appreciate six months from now. I’ll probably smack my head and scream “now I get it” while on the road.
“I put a bullet in his sugar head/ He thanked me kindly and he laid down dead/ Phony roses blossomed where he bled/ Then all the cheering Angels shook my hand and said/ I’m the man who murdered love/ What do you think of that?”
We’re All Light takes empty party chat up lines (at least according to Neville Farmer’s great book Song Stories), shaken well and (with a twist of Partridge wit) turns them into a great song. Standing In For Joe reportedly was originally was intended the band’s aborted bubblegum album. The fact that Standing In For Joe ended up on the album indicates that Wasp Star is really an updated version of the bubblegum. In fact, most of Wasp Star (with the exception of a few tracks) would have fit nicely on that aborted project. A pity that Virgin (the band’s former label) didn’t have the insight to see what a terrific album the bubblegum album would have been ( Partridge had proposed that the band record a number of bubblegum pop songs under various names similar to the Dukes album)
Partridge’s Wounded Horse is a blues shuffle that drones on way too long. It could have easily been cut from the album. Wounded Horse must have wandered in from the wrong neighborhood. It quickly fades from memory and doesn’t do the album much damage. You and The Clouds Will Still Be Beautiful is, on the other hand, one of the best songs Partridge has ever written. This wonderful love song has tremendous radio potential (more so than We’ re All Light). One of the few tracks that I didn’t worship was Partridge’s Church of Women. It didn’t fire up my imagination like some of the other selections on the album did. It might be one of those tunes that I’ll suddenly appreciate six months from now. I’ll probably smack my head and scream “now I get it” while on the road. The Wheel and the Maypole ends the album on an upbeat note. It’s a jaunty number that doesn’t bring to mind anything the band has done before.
I can’t help feeling that Wasp Star should have come out before Apple Venus Volume One. This is clearly the more commercial of the two albums and the one radio is more likely to embrace. That doesn’t detract from the quality of the music contained here. Wasp Star is one of the finest pop albums the band has made and the best songs are equal to anything on Skylarking or Black Sea. . It’s less ambitious than the last couple of albums, but no less accomplished. Wasp Star isn’t the stinging guitar album that Xtc promised and, perhaps, that’s a good thing.
4 Stars
Wasp Star, Calgary Sun - 21 May, 2000
On "strike" for seven years to get out of their record deal with Virgin, XTC made a triumphant return in 1999 with the magnificent Apple Venus Vol. 1, a lush and lovely orchestral work that nevertheless left some bemused fans wondering where the electric guitars went. Well, they're here on the second half of the group's comeback epic (in stores Tuesday), a collection of tremendously catchy guitar-pop songs that prove songwriters Andy Partridge and Colin Moulding haven't gone all easy-listening in their middle age. Almost all of these 12 new songs are immediately accessible and blessed with splendourous pop melodies and Beatlesque vocal harmonies. Yet they're hardly lightweight, managing to grab hold and make sense of life's big themes. OK, maybe there's not that much content to Partridge's Stupidly Happy, a one-riff song that pogos on the spot for three minutes of irrepressible romantic bliss. Yet his deft hand with metaphor is demonstrated on Playground, on which he cleverly argues that the schoolyard is a rehearsal for adult life ("Some sweet girl playing my wife/ Runs off with the boy whose bike she likes"); My Brown Guitar, another of his slyly naughty songs about his faithful trouser pal; and Church of Women, an exaltation of daughters, girlfriends, wives and mothers. Moulding, as usual, offers his keen observations about British house and home on the bluesy Boarded Up, a lament for his dying hometown of Swindon, and the jaunty In Another Life, a big-hearted song about longtime spouses working to keep their romance alive. As much as Partridge protests otherwise, the absence of guitarist Dave Gregory, who left XTC during the Apple Venus Vol. 1 sessions, does leave a void, as Wasp Star lacks some of the fine embroidery that Gregory knitted into XTC's best songs. That quibbles aside, no one makes thinking man's pop any better than XTC, 24 years into their recording career and still untouchable.
Dave Veitch
Wasp Star, Bass Player
Magazine - June 2000
(contributed by Annie
Holloway)
Bassist: Colin Moulding
Instrument: 1969 Vox Apollo 4The second volume of the British popsters' long-awaited return proves absence makes the heart grow fonder. Compared to last years' Volume I, this outing is much more in tune with Moulding and his songwriting partner Andy Partridge's rock past. Colin often lays out for sizable parts of songs like "The Wheel and the Maypole", and when he comes in it's clear just how essential his tasteful lines are. Also check out Moulding's lovely upper-range melodic fills on "Playground".
Greg Olwell
Wasp Star, Rolling Stone -
May 2000
(contributed by Annie
Holloway)
Most of us forget the slights and setbacks we endured at recess. Not Andy Partridge, the principal singer-songwriter of XTC. On "Playground," the ripping first track on Wasp Star, he sifts through long-ago humiliations for clues to his adult personality. As a festival of childish voices taunts him, he recalls being "marked by the masters and bruised by the bullies," and eventually concludes that "you may leave school, but it never leaves you." Such a reverie is vintage XTC, but it would quickly grow tedious if pumped up into the kind of florid pop symphony that this veteran British outfit employed on last year's Apple Venus Volume 1. Instead, Partridge and Colin Moulding return to basic rhythm-guitar rock on Wasp Star, following the contours of their tracks' melodies, resisting the impulse to endlessly embellish -- these twelve songs are streamlined, uncluttered miniatures. They don't all rate with XTC's best (that would be a lot to ask), but an age-old lesson runs through the groaning blues of Moulding's "Boarded Up," the deliriously elongated phrases of "You and the Clouds Will Still Be Beautiful" and the knotted tension of "My Brown Guitar": Sometimes you really can say more by playing less.
Tom Moon
Wasp Star, CMJ New Music
Report - May 2000
(contributed by Annie
Holloway)
The second volume in XTC's comeback opus finds the perennial pop underdogs returning to the electrified Beatle-pop drive of their '80s prime after lulling fans with a bittersweet symphony on 1999's Apple Venus Volume 1. But while Wasp Star is instrumentally more akin to the amplified quirk of English Settlement and Oranges And Lemons, the poetic fortitude and lush beauty of Apple Venus remains a constant on the second volume, albeit in a more stripped-down form. Recorded in Colin Moulding's renovated garage studio, he and partner Andy Partridge's 12th proper album is filled with future classics like the giddy, quasi-Stones romp "Stupidly Happy" and the Lennon-esque blues medley "Wounded Horse." If you're one of the few who thought XTC was making that beeline towards the MOR nursing home, wait until you feel the sting of this wasp's saccharine venom.
Ron Hart
Wasp Star, Virgin.Net - May 2000
More guitar pop with round glasses from the band that are enjoying a revival about ten years after they were meant to be finished. Naturally, Apple Venus Vol. 2 follows on fairly closely from last year's Apple Venus Vol. One. Volume One was a neat piece of psychedelic whimsy with its experimental compositions and orchestral sounds, but here XTC get back to basics. With stripped down arrangements, Andy Partridge and Colin Moulding rely mainly on their own talents with the odd flourish from brass or strings. Such a style enables XTC to reveal more of their core talent, songwriting. The pair are unlikely to rediscover the directness of Sgt Rock or the urgency of Senses Working Overtime, but AVV2 has fine sentiments in We're All Light and memorable images in Church Of Women. Although dumped by Virgin Records (sic), XTC still manage to kick sand in the face of daunting opposition.
Wasp Star, Aversion.com - May 2000
It’s been a long, long time since fans of XTC’s quirky pop were treated to a new installment in the band’s series. Sure, there was last year’s Apple Venus Vol. 1 (TVT), but for the most part that album’s quirkier-than-normal symphonic orchestration left many scratching their heads in bewilderment. Wasp Star, however, finds the band returning to its pop roots.
Simple, straightforward guitar-centric pop makes its return on this album-the first of the pure pop form from XTC since 1992’s Nonsuch (Geffen)-finding the band’s mastery of pop forms anything but dulled during its absence from the music world. While not delivering the sharp pop gems of its early ‘80s heyday, XTC still comes through with its usual coupling honest and witty lyrics with sparkling rock.
As always, the band’s attack centers on its lyrical fare. Combining the wit of the singer/songwriter with a firm pop sensibility, XTC keeps its songs both easily accessible as well as able to parade several clever turns of phrase. Finding an even more refined sense of maturity on this record, the band keeps Wasp Star moving through emotional peaks and valleys. From the uplifting "Stupidly Happy," an ode to the frisson of newfound love, to the even keeled "Standing in for Joe," a tale of a man sleeping with his best friend’s wife, to the depths of "Wounded Horse," a sour number addressing singer/guitarist Andy Partridge’s divorce, XTC tackles a wide range of emotion on this record.
While sticking closer to its traditional pop stylings on this album than on its previous outing, the band doesn’t limit itself to simple anthemic pop numbers. Finding a swath of textures, Wasp Star’s tracks feature several different spins on the band’s sound. Be it the traditional sound of XTC in "I’m the Man Who Murdered Love," or the hollow and dead "Boarded Up," or the bluesey "My Brown Guitar," XTC ponders new personas on this record without abandoning its signature sound.
The act’s shift from straight-up songwriting to more mature directions gives this album slightly more personal impact than its early records, though it’s a tradeoff coming at the price of some of the acts pop immediacy. Still crafting warm pop numbers, XTC nonetheless pushes itself back a bit from the pop table for more personal consideration on this album, a move making Wasp Star lack a bit of the sonic punch of its many predecessors.
Wasp Star, iCast - May 2000
Hands up, everyone who was secretly disappointed by the gentle orchestral sound of last year's XTC comeback, Apple Venus. True, there was no way that album could have lived up to fans' expectations: Thanks to a well-publicized fight with their record label, XTC put themselves "on strike" and released nothing for seven years. The eventual release proved to be one of their loveliest records, but also their subtlest. If you were hoping to get knocked over by great guitar sounds and memorable pop hooks, you instead had to absorb the rich orchestral arrangements, the folkish melodies and the pastoral imagery.
Now comes the long-promised "rock album" and if you're still waiting for those massive hooks and great guitar sounds, then Wasp Star is indeed the stuff. The sound has a rough, garage-y spontaneity to it; and we can almost guarantee that you'll come away humming something. Still, it's not that big a change from the last album. It may be guitars and drums instead of strings and keyboards this time, but once again the songs have a warm and rustic tinge. The blast of guitars that opens "Playground" (and the album) may bring memories of 1980's "Respectable Street" (the album-opener from Black Sea), but the new melody and overall arrangement are better crafted, if less manic, than anything XTC did back then.
The best song on Apple Venus, "Your Dictionary" was inspired by singer/guitarist Andy Partridge's bitter divorce, and he revisits that territory with the new album's "Wounded Horse." But much of this album reflects his newfound bliss, and there are more love songs here than have ever been on an XTC album. Partridge had to go back ten years to dig up a cynical song, "I'm the Man Who Murdered Love" (which was originally intended for the Nonsuch album, and could have been its hit single). The real surprise here is the re-emergence of singer/bassist Colin Moulding, breaking the songwriting slump that he's been in for years. His "In Another Life" may be the most charming Beatles homage this band's ever done -- which for XTC is saying something -- and the infidelity song "Standing in For Joe" matches giddy tune to messy subject matter. Partridge winds up providing the album's summary with "Stupidly Happy," but don't believe it -- XTC aren't really capable of being stupidly anything.
Brett Milano
Wasp Star, Mojo - May 2000
When asked XTC doesn't tour (and he frequently is), Andy Partridge likes to compare his records to paintings, with the studio as his canvas. Once the painting is completed you don't expect the artist to repaint it in front of you, do you?
Apple Venus Volume 1 was the band's first outing for seven years, and a triumphant vindication of Partridge's bloody-minded determination (with his partner Colin Moulding) to keep XTC going as a studio-only concern, whatever the pressures: illness, debt, the last-minute departure of guitarist Dave Gregory. A gorgeously orchestrated and ambitious song cycle, AV1 garnered XTC some of the best reviews of their career. And here's the good news: Volume 2 is even better.
Ironically, Wasp Star - Mayan for Venus, apparently - is an album that could be reproduced live, a collection of guitary pop songs which may well be the band's most straightforward set ever. XTC records have a reputation for being growers, often to their commercial detriment, but it would take real musical Attention Deficit Disorder not to get most of these songs on the first or second listen. We're All Light, Standing In For Joe and I'm The Man Who Murdered Love all have more hooks than Velcro. And in the one-riff-and-that's-your-lot Stupidly Happy, they might just have one of the stupidest and happiest ditties ever committed to tape. "All the lights of the cars in the town form the strings of a big guitar," sings Partridge gleefully. It could even be - steady now - a hit.
But despite Partridge's claims that Wasp Star would be a big dumb axefest, things aren't that stoopid - this is XTC after all, not The Ramones. The Wheel And The Maypole intricately entwines two entirely different songs; Boarded Up ("two-by-four-ded up") is Moulding's bluesy lament for his home town; My Brown Guitar (you work it out) is charmingly filthy; and the astonishing Church Of Women - from Partridge purring "butter-err-err-err" in the first verse to the song's a capella, devotional ending - is naïve, lusty and beautiful.
The truth is that very few people make records like this any more; big-hearted, brainy, funny and poignant, and in the Grand Tradition of British pop that stretches back to, yup, The Beatles. It's another old master from the old master painters.
Andy Partridge talks to Andy Miller.
First a Pink Thing, now a Brown Guitar. Leave it alone, you'll go blind!
"(Laughing) Yeah, what colour is it? Well, one half of it's pink. It's a bit like a Zoom lolly - you suck it and it changes colour."This being a more traditional-sounding record - did you miss having a second guitarist?
"Er, no. I was a bit worried at first, 'cos I used to give all the fancy stuff to Dave Gregory. I'd give him all the difficult bits to do. 'Can you find an arpeggio to tumble down as I'm singing that bit?' I did put off all the solos and the twiddly bits right 'til the end of the album. But I think I did OK."Is that your daughter singing on Playground?
"It is. She's got fantastic pitch and she plays the guitar. I mean, I couldn't sing, I still have to really work at it, but she's just got it, you know. I had to ask her to sing out of tune. I took her into the studio and said, Look, you have to be a gang of kids in a playground. She sang it and she sounded like Nina Simone."Whatever happened to The Dukes Of Stratosphear's bubblegum album?
"We were going to be 12 different bands. I've got a book of band names that we were going to be. Like Sopwith Caramel or The Twelve Flavors of Hercules. (Finds notebook) Let me go through some of these names: The Tweedledeens, The Herbert Fountains, Irving Merlin, The Lollipopes, The Four Posters, The Periwig Pack, Cake's Progress, Jellyache, Funnel Of Love, The Rubber Ducks, Ancient Grease, The Piccadilly Circus Tent Rip Repair Company, Kitchener's Sink, Isambard Kingdom Necessary On A Bicycle? (Much hilarity ensues) There's another page at the back here. . ."
Wasp Star, Spin - May 2000
(Contributed by
Jessica Kashiwabara)
"A riff? An electric guitar riff?" were the first words I said once my jaw was able to open and close in its normal fashion. That's right, "Playground," the opening track on Wasp Star, the follow-up to 1999's "orchoustic" Apple Venus Volume 1, opens up with a crunchy electric guitar line soon followed by heavily-bashed drums. Shocking, really, when you think about the contrast with "River of Orchids," the opening track from Vol. 1, which was built around a string section and rhythmic water drops.
The suddenly prolific XTC (prior to last year, the band had put out only one album in the '90s), now comprised only of founding members Andy Partridge and Colin Moulding, had said that they initially wanted to release a double CD set, with half dominated by strings and acoustic instruments and the other an electric rock and roll album. For mostly monetary reasons, they ended up releasing the two discs a year apart, with Wasp Star representing the rock and roll album - and what an album it is.
While I'm not sure what "wasp star" means (although I understand it is Mayan for "venus"), I know that I have been infected by the album's twelve songs as if stung by them. Since I judge XTC on a much higher standard than most bands, I have to admit that after the first few listens I was not particularly impressed with the record. However, by the fourth or fifth time, I began scratching all over, especially on my head because I found that Wasp Star was stuck there and no matter what I tried to do it wouldn't go away. I tried an ointment comprised of the Beatles and Belle and Sebastian but nothing changed. I drank in some Nirvana backed up with an Elvis Costello chaser but still I had that XTC itch. Finally, I gave in, and have been listening to Wasp Star for about two weeks straight with very little interruption.
Andy Partridge, chief singer/songwriter/genius, has been producing near flawless Beatle-esque pop for about 25 years now and he still knows how to turn a phrase like few others. A chief example is "Wounded Horse," in which he laments over a funereal dirge, "Well, I stumbled and I fell like a wounded horse / when I found out you've been riding another man." And, in "Church of Women," the singer cops to genuflecting at the feet of the fairer sex but still doesn't understand them at all. In another twist of lyrical phrasing, he sings "like us men, like us men, will they ever like us men?"
Musically, Messrs. Partridge and Moulding (who contributed three of the twelve tunes here) continue to pay close attention to their musical heroes. Moulding's "Boarded Up," about the death of his hometown, thematically evokes vintage mid-'60s Kinks, while the white-reggae/jazz of "You and the Clouds Will Still Be Beautiful" would make Steely Dan proud and "The Wheel and the Maypole" closes out the CD with beautifully haunting Pet Sounds-like harmonies. While overrated bands like Oasis try to recreate their heroes (but fail), XTC proudly displays its roots while subsuming them into a larger sound, one that is wholly their own.
So it pains me to admit that, despite the fact that few artists today could produce such a strong collection of timeless pop, Wasp Star will likely drown a quiet and painless commercial death in the sea of mediocre, radio-friendly drivel. On the other hand, it is good to know that long after Christina Aguilera's breasts have begun to sag and she's living in a trailer in West Virginia with a guy named Cletus, Wasp Star will still be a great album and XTC a great (albeit remarkably old) band. Do yourself a favor and get stung.
Barry Stelboum
Wasp Star, Amazon - June 2000
Sidelined by a decade-long "strike" against their former record label, XTC's Andy Partridge and Colin Moulding nonetheless kept themselves busy writing songs and recording demos during the 1990s. The resulting body of work was divvied up stylistically, with the more pastoral/orchestral pieces consigned to Apple Venus Volume One (and Homespun, its accompanying home-demo collection). The brash electric guitar flourish that launches Wasp Star's "Playground" heralds a collection that leans toward the jangly guitars and jagged rhythms of the band's Black Sea and English Settlement prime. Adorned with ornate harmonic flourishes and their trademark pop sophistication, Wasp Star finds creative mainstay Andy Partridge in a distinctly upbeat, romantically intoxicated state of mind (as witnessed by the virtually irony-free "Stupidly Happy"), yet one in which history-bred suspicions die hard. It's Moulding who seems the most melancholy here, with the gentle romantic prodding of "In Another Life" and in the downright gloomy take on his hometown's future, "Boarded Up." Known for occasional pointed social jabs, XTC's focus has become a bit more philosophical with age, Partridge and Moulding perhaps gleaning the wisdom that the hardest battles are sometimes fought on the home front. But if music this joyous and rewarding is the result, it's been the noblest of struggles.
Jerry McCulley
And from the UK site...
The subtitle is perplexing: though apparently intended as a companion piece to XTC's 1999 comeback album Apple Venus Vol 1., the songs on Wasp Star have little to do with the pastoral orchestrations of Apple Venus and much more in common with the XTC albums that preceded it, especially Oranges and Lemons and Skylarking. This is altogether welcome news, of course: though nothing XTC have ever put their name to has been dull, their greatest strength has always been fairly straightforward pop songs with subtle kinks in the musical and lyrical structure (think "Senses Working Overtime", "Love On A Farmboy's Wages"). The finest moments of Wasp Star--notably the epic pop hymn "The Wheel and The Maypole" and the spectacularly titled devotional "You And The Clouds Will Still Be Beautiful"-- stand comparison with those or any other of XTC's many finest hours. That, in pop terms, makes the best moments of Wasp Star about as good as it gets.
Andrew Mueller
Wasp Star, Q Magazine - June 2000
It's now two albums in two years for the newly twosome.
All the platitudes carelessly shoved XTC's way ("English", "pastoral" and most damning, "quirky") have contributed to Andy Partridge (nine songs here) and Colin Moulding (just the three) appearing to exist as harmless eccentrics dedicated to selling no records. That, as their diminishing but fanatical fan base probably doesn't wish to know (oh, you patronizing git! - Simon), isn't the case at all. They make often wistful, often wry, but always intelligent pop. Always have done, always will do. Thus, I'm The Man Who Murdered Love could have sprung from 1979's Drums and Wires; Boarded Up is the token squiggly but dark moment and The Wheel And The Maypole is pastoral, English and quirky. Elsewhere, are the usual layerd vocals, quietly desperate lyrics and the nagging impression that everyone is happy with how things are. And so they should be.
3 stars out of 5
John Aizlewood
All original work is acknowledged as being the copyright of the originator.
