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This album, the band's full-length debut (they had an EP prior to this, contained within the bonus tracks), sounds little like the material that would later bring the band its greatest successes (apart from the vocals, of course, which are exactly the same here as they would be later).
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A more fitting title, yes, but probably not better for the reasons that were intended. so their solution was to change the name to White Music. Originally, the band wanted to go with the ultra-ironic title of Black Music, but the record company was afraid of racist accusations coming towards the band.
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The story of this album's title is a fairly well-known one, but it's so ridiculous that it's worth repeating. My personal favorites are Black Sea, Skylarking and Chips From the Chocolate Fireball, but most of them have plenty of gems that should satisfy any fan of awkward-but-clever pop-rock.īest song: Radios In Motion or Statue Of Liberty maybe Maybe the band's output wasn't "important" in the way one might want out of a band rated this highly, and maybe their albums could be just monotonous enough to keep them from consistently reaching the highest echelons of my personal rankings, but they've become an important part of my post-60s musical diet, and they absolutely deserve a **** rating in my personal hierarchy. I eventually got used to the vocals and the band's approach, and more than that I came to realize that Partridge and Moulding valued the same things in pop music as I do to an extent that could match or exceed any songwriting duo I'd come across short of Lennon and McCartney. I had a few of their better regarded albums on my iPod despite my relative lack of familiarity with them, and over and over, I found myself thinking, "Boy, that's a really fun and clever and interesting song" about their songs when I'd come across them. As much as with any group in my collection, though, my habit of putting my iPod on shuffle greased the skids for them to ascend rapidly in my personal ranks. Eventually, the band got tied up in some ugliness with its distribution label (Virgin), and the band's ending was a little unceremonious and anti-climactic, but they were good to the very end.Īt first, I didn't especially care for this band the vocals (especially Andy's) and the general prissiness of so much of their output didn't make me think that I'd ever consider them one of my favorite groups. Rather than hurt the band, this development eventually led to its commercial and critical peak, with the band fully reinventing itself as a non-mainstream mainstream pop band, and the peaks from this era ( Skylarking and the 60s-throwback work the band did under the name The Dukes of Stratosphear) make for some of my favorite pop music made after the 70s. Eventually, Andy Partridge (guitars, vocals and one of the main songwriters, along with bassist/vocalist Colin Moulding) had a nervous breakdown that developed into a chronic case of stage fright, and the band was forced into studio-only mold.
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8BIT DRUMMER ROUNDABOUT HOW TO
When the 80s came around, though, the band somehow found a way to take this same core approach and make it work the band was still firmly within the New Wave camp, and the hooks had the same intensity, but they figured out how to graft them into a slightly more conventional pop sensibility, and the results were often magical. In the 70s, the band was a NEW WAVE band in all caps they could write memorable songs, but their preferred approach was to punch the listener in the face with ideas without any let up or restraint, and a lot of their material from these albums gives the sense of a band that wanted to be tough and punk-ish but couldn't because they were too fey to pull it off. XTC had a much better career than their first few albums suggested they probably would. Chips From The Chocolate Fireball (The Dukes Of Stratosphear)."I'm Invading Territories/Girls Are Foreign And Strange To Me/Get The Expert At Kissing And Stuff/He Stays Easy When Things Get Rough" XTC Completely confused by the rating system? Go here for an explanation.