A Brief Apology Followed by Something Better

Sorry about the long stay at the Wombat Test address.

As Rory sez, Last Plane to Jakarta is capable of making you seriously rethink a certain band's much-discussed (and much dissed) recent product.

It also makes any attempts that we might make in this space to supply thoughtful re-evaluations of recordings seem, well, doomed to be underwhelming. Now, having admitted this and hopefully, through what we admit is a kind of a cheap gesture, foreclosed on your ability to wave off our pathetic music-musings as...well, pathetic, we launch right ahead.

Raised as we were by parents generous in many things material and otherwise but oddly parsimonious when it came to recordings ("save your money" was the withering response to any plans we floated to purchase, say, the much-desired copy of In the Court of the Crimson King or any such valuable item), we developed a profound feeling of shame and uncertainty when buying records, as if we were in danger of going broke and landing on the street as the result of LP-overindulgence. Consequently, we never had a very good record collection. Living as we did with and near people who were able to follow their instincts without our complex sense of purchase-guilt, we let them do the buying and listened without fear of penury: when we moved out , we amassed shoeboxes full of Maxell 90-minute tapes, each one a memento of a time and place, as well as a small violation of intellectual property law.

One of those tapes contained XTC's 1980 album Black Sea; as part of a long-term project to get right with the law and prove that we're not slaves to neurosis, we got the CD a couple of days ago and took it to work.

It's no masterpiece (that would, for this band, be Skylarking, despite the bitterness that went into its making), but a few things stood out on a careful couple of relistens: The fun of the tom-toms in "A Rocket From A Bottle." The joy of a time when that vague ska influence didn't signal dumbass fratboy party music (at least, not in this country).* The bizarre rightness of the coda to "Towers of London" -- to cap a song about the exploitation of Irish labor in the construction of Victorian London, apparently it is necessary to rip off the Beach Boys. The electric kazoo of "Sgt. Rock."

Of course, the record is full of bad ideas: Partridge's unwitty antinuke jibes ("Living Through Another Cuba"), a watery discussion of romantic impulses that sounds like it came from Thomas Dolby's discard pile ("Love at First Sight"), and the closing must-skip epic "Travels in Nihilon."

But on the whole it does what it needs to, even now as a recognizable child of its musically schizzy time: despite its title there's in all of Black Sea that sense of youth and brightness, of appealingly loopy energy (which always, with Andy Partridge, threatens to collapse into annoyingly loopy energy) which makes a damp March morning burn at the edges with Optimism's Flame.

*Though we note that the first time we heard "No Thugs In Our House" it was at a frat-ish house party where studly types in surfer shorts reigned, and we thought at the time (not listening clearly to the lyrics) that it was some kind of weird anti-punk anthem.

Posted by BT at March 12, 2002 11:56 PM