#453/2103
October 27 1986
XTC
Skylarking
Genre: Power Pop
Genre: Power Pop
2.25 out of 5
Just kidding.
Gotcha, though didn’t I?
This is a 5 out of 5 record. Through and through. I listened to this thing like mad when it came out and, yet, even though it got heavy rotation in my last year of college, it’s really the sound of Los Angeles in the 80s to me. MY Los Angeles. My life. My adult life, which began out here.
The album is designed to play like a cycle, they say. Sure. A cycle is a day. A week. A year. A lifetime.
Not only does the entire thing flow like a magic carpet of psychedelic power pop, it calls to mind all the great albums of the past, like Sgt. Pepper and Pet Sounds and moves them into the 80s and, here’s the great trick that Andy and Colin and Todd pull off: It sounds current today.
I could spout lyrical content or go on about individual songs for hours but I won’t because there isn’t a bad track on this thing and every one of them has a lyric/couplet/poem that stands the test of time.
I will point to “Dear God”, though. It was left off the original release, we all know, but, dammit, it is really the foundation for my entire religious belief system.
Except that the conceit is that, in order for the narrator to castigate “God”, he must sing TO him, making him agnostic. He clearly is not. “If there’s one thing I don’t believe in, it’s you.” is an indictment that presages the coming ascendency of the “nones”. This is the song that is the harbinger not of doom but of the opposite of hope. Not hopelessness, just a resignation that, although the band is using the tropes of the hippy, peace and love era, they are more cynical and, tbh, realists. There might be no better anthem for Gen X than that one.
No comments:
Post a Comment