Nonsuch is XTC's tenth album, and their last one before they went on strike against Virgin Records. I listened to the entire album today for the first time in awhile, and it's kind of exhausting to listen to all the way through. There are lots of good songs and performances, with great drumming by Dave Mattacks, but not enough to hold it together for 17 songs and 64 minutes. I have a similar problem with Oranges & Lemons.
Nonsuch has always been a challenge for me because I don't like its first song and single "The Ballad of Peter Pumpkinhead" (which has always struck me as XTC-lite) so the album always starts on the wrong foot. Then the second song (Colin's "My Bird Performs") is one of my favorites, and the third one ("Dear Madam Barnham") is okay, but the fourth one ("Humble Daisy") is less good. And so on and so forth. Somewhere there's a great ten song album hiding amongst the 17 songs of Nonsuch, but it's hard for me to get any listening momentum with it.
The last song on the album ("Books Are Burning") is one of the ten great songs though. Here's a BBC performance from XTC's last live appearance in April 1992.
3 comments:
this has been a very interesting series for me because I also love (a lot of) XTC's catalogue, but see them very differently (the herky-jerky first few with Barry Andrews are still among my faves). I think this is the first post that I agree completely with.
Whereas "Books Are Burning" has always struck me as sort of lyrically overwrought, musically blah. I suppose "Peter..." is "lite" in the sense that it has very few left turns in it and is pretty much pure pop for now people - but they do that so seldom (the failing to turn left thing) that I like it all the more for that.
Andy is a fabulous guitar player.
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