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ivan@stellysee.de
| From | <jim@groovedisques.com> |
| Subject | Re: fuzzy warbles? |
| Date | Thu, 8 May 2003 13:17:17 -0400 |
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Jim, I agree completely with your take on XTC's golden age, although I like the second album a lot more than you probably do. I buy 85% of what they continue to put out to support them for their long-gone but once sustained period of brilliant work and the likelihood of getting 2 killer songs off any recent release. I've got Fuzzy Warbles, vol. 2. I don't know if it's really the second volume or how many there are. My take on both this CD and the demos included on Coat of Many Cupboards is this: In both cases, I am disappointed that there aren't many (any?) full demos from Black Sea and English Settlement. In the liner notes to Coat... Andy explains that he didn't make many home demos until a bit later, during Mummer. Of the Coat... demos, I especially like the demo of "Grass". It's one of the only demos I like better than a real album version of their's. Coat... and Fuzzy Warbles contain acoustic snippets of his sketches for "Senses Working Overtime" and "All of a Sudden", !
respectively, but they're not full demos. Fuzzy Warbles has a fun demo of "25 O'Clock", and I once heard a demo of "Bike Ride to the Moon" that was good, if abbreviated. My volume of Fuzzy Warbles also has a demo of "You're the Wish You Are I Had", a song I love. However, by that time the real XTC albums were made with programmed drums, so all you get is a nearly identical version, with lower-fi programmed drums and cheaper vocal mics. The demos of other unreleased songs from their post-Terry Chambers era also are just a fancy drum machine (or Prairie Prince et al, aka human drum machines) away from sounding like real album tracks. That said, some of the songs are plain good, just not holding the "magic" of demos. Did all that make any sense. I'm sure I twisted some fellow Chalkhillians' knickers:)
Jim
www.groovedisques.com
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