Skylarking - XTC (1986)

ideated from: some birthday-inspired comfort food records.

make sure you listen to the remaster. Some problems in mastering mean that the 20th century versions of the album sound like it was recorded inside a cavern

XTC never strayed too far from standard British psychedelic pop that had been around for a couple of decades already. What set them apart was their attention to detail, their songcraft, and the ultra-clever lyrics of songwriting tandem Andy Partridge and Colin Moulding.

Outsider rock weirdo Todd Rundgren produces and lets the band’s tendency towards melody and whimsy run wild in new, more modern and less post-punky ways.

Tracks I Liked

Ballet For A Rainy Day - inventing new worlds to inhabit

1000 Umbrellas - a perfect transition to a perfect pop lament

Earn Enough For Us - A theory: this song tells the same story as Bon Jovi’s Livin On A Prayer–released the same month–but from very different perspectives.

The Man Who Sailed Around His Soul - I put on an XTC record and a 70s fusion song came out

Dear God - The reason I paid attention to this album was Dear God, a B-side that was actually tacked onto the album in later pressings after it took America by storm. You might be well familiar with the reasons people give for having lost their faith: the “problem of evil”, the question of how a God that loves us could allow terrible things to happen to so many of us.

I had no such perspective, being raised in a basically fundamentalist household. I had genuinely never been exposed to this basic question about why things are the way they are. I would have come in contact with this train of thought eventually, but my first exposure to it being XTC’s harrowing track drove it home.