Disc of the day
Bo Diddley - Bo Diddley
Magnificent late-'50s singles round-up that keeps on giving.
Features Disc of the day
XTC
Skylarking
(Virgin, 1986)
Everyone’s ripping them off, especially the Kaiser Chiefs. All hail the originals!
Things weren’t exactly harmonious between main XTC songwriter Andy Partridge and Skylarking producer Todd Rundgren, who was brought in to answer charges that the Swindon group were just too English to translate internationally. Yet if their collaboration at Rundgren’s Woodstock studio were businesslike-to-hostile rather than chummy, the results were sublime. Here was finely-tuned pop nous with strings and West Country Beach Boys harmonies, used to make an album of symmetry and poetry that, in a continuous flow, takes in all life stages before concluding where it began. Amniotic opener Summer’s Cauldron, complete with heat haze and the literal sound of birds and bees, begins a trio of songs touching on fecund nature – singles Grass and The Meeting Place both frankly celebrate outdoor nookie. Songs of everyday magic, marriage, domestic aggro and pregnancy follow, but after the dream-jazz of Mermaid Smiled, payback comes with the hepcat existentialism of The Man Who Sailed Around His Soul (as with The Meeting Place, a video was filmed at Portmeirion in north Wales, homaging 1967’s surrealist spy series The Prisoner) and the self-explanatory Dying. But with benign pagan Sacrificial Bonfire showing new life springing from decay, it’s hard to feel the universe is anything less than benevolent. The CD issue adds on b-side-turned-single Dear God, a coolly angry comment on religion that’s just as pertinent 22 years on.
Ian Harrison
Posted by Ross_Bennett at 6:00 AM GMT 06/11/2008
Further Listening
XTC – Oranges and Lemons (Virgin, 1988)
The Beach Boys – Pet Sounds (Capitol, 1966)
Fleet Foxes – Fleet Foxes (Bella Union, 2008)
Previous Disc of the day
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Bo Diddley - Bo Diddley
Magnificent late-'50s singles round-up that keeps on giving.
6:00 AM GMT 20/11/2009
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Isley Brothers - The Brothers: Isley
The Cincinnati siblings bed into their heavy period.
6:00 AM GMT 18/11/2009
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Lee Morgan - Search For The New Land
The trumpeter's most soulful excursion entrances MOJO messageboarder.
6:00 AM GMT 16/11/2009
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