one of these days you can cast aside your human, be free

XTC: Oranges & Lemons

Oranges & Lemons is XTC at their most glossy and overproduced, oddly enough the most eighties-sounding album they produced, appearing at the end of that busy decade for them. It is still a pretty good album. They always were a pop band, just with a little bit more bite, and some of that bite is still here. “The Garden of Earthly Delights” benefits from the weird, cartoonish bounce of Colin Moulding’s bass and a frantic, everywhere-at-once pace. It serves, I suppose, as an introduction to the album, a ‘welcome to the garden of earthly delights.’ Oranges & Lemons is, you see, a topical album, ever a dread prospect. Perhaps that is why they adopted such a slick eighties sound here, in order to contrast with their criticism of eighties life and culture. As Andy Partridge sings on “One of the Millions” ‘I’m not akin to the eighties thing where you look after number one, but I won’t rock the boat cause I’m scared what might happen.’ The political commentary of the album is often a little hamfisted, particularly on the atrocious and insipid “Here Comes President Kill Again” and really doesn’t sit well alongside their more traditional subject matter of such things as blissful idiocy on “The Mayor of Simpleton”.

However, some of the songs are a bit more clear-eyed and sly. “King for a Day” is especially glittering and chiming in its arrangement, quite a backdrop to a very harsh song about selling out, belying the real intent of this project. “One of the Million” with the aforementioned line, is similarly themed, but from the other side, the defense of the sold out and compliant, a self-professed powerlessness in the face of change. “Scarecrow People” takes a page from T.S. Eliot, a warning update of “The Hollow Men” and end of the world fever.

The album’s real trouble besides its occasionally overreaching social aims and its overdone shine is just plain inconsistent songwriting. “The Loving” is possibly the most saccharine moment of their entire career, something they usually did a fine job of cutting through. It is particularly harmed in contrast with the excellent and completely bizarre “Poor Skeleton Steps Out” which follows it, a superb tune about the apocalypse with a sharp, shifting guitar part. While the closing “Chalkhills and Children” is lush and magnificent, the several tracks leading up to it are merely average. That, really, is what Oranges & Lemons turns out to be, a decent album with the occasional flash of XTC’s irrepressible quirky greatness.

75% => ***1/2

see also the weird promotional puppet show they did for the album

~ by jshopa on June 21, 2008.