“Carving out a Niche for Oranges & Lemons.”

XTC definitely isn’t required material, let me please first say. They’re not the cornerstone of British pop-punk, like The Clash and the Buzzcocks, or of classic rock, like Floyd and Zep, or of “Britpop,” like The Stone Roses, Oasis and Blur. In fact, they always seemed to embrace being the odd men out, letting a sense of humor and scattershot, hodgepodge methodology inform their sound and songwriting. Short of writing for the footballers or the tweakers, then, their audience may have been more so composed of chess players who cry when they listen to Delilah [1], or “nerds,” if you prefer.

And, indeed, I’ll admit that my decision today to further my mission of finding an album by them other than The English Settlement and The Compact XTC to go to was driven partly out of fear. I was mentally referencing, in particular, the song that caps off side A of their 1989 album Oranges & Lemons, “One of the Millions”: “But I won’t rock the boat / ’Cause I’m scared what might happen”. Right now I’m living in my hometown of South Bend, Indiana, the worst city in Indiana for violent crime, and I’m staying at the Kenrose Motel, where my next-door neighbors spend every night yelling their heads off at each other. Amazingly, I haven’t heard a slap or a glass breaking over someone’s head. Anyway, let’s just say I was ready for Oranges & Lemons, an album not really worlds apart from my beloved English Settlement, an old denizen of my iPod shuffle at work, and its rhythmically sound, funky and complex, and of course discursively quirky, approach to what eventually materializes as Apollonian popular rock. (Along these lines, give the band credit for, even by the end of the’ 80s, staying true to their original form and making really arguably the most “quintessentially XTC” album of their career here, with angular, methodical funk eschewing the noise rock of fellow Britons The Jesus and Mary Chain and the mod, narcotic pop of The Stone Roses.)

Oranges & Lemons has an excellent mid-section, not unlike R.E.M.’s Up, and I have five specific favorite tracks on the album: “Here Comes President Kill again”; “The Loving”; “One of the Millions”; “Merely a Man” and “Across This Antheap.” What’s further rewarding is that each of these tracks does a great job of distinguishing itself from the others — the defeatist pop-funk of the aforementioned “One of the Millions” is foiled nicely by haunting, stately doom in “Here Comes President Kill again”; contrasted, itself, sharply by “Across This Antheap”; a track entirely pedagogical within the band’s catalogue for its rollicking, funky style and synth instrumentation which seems to flood the mix like an ulterior species of textural mania. Then, in “The Loving” and “Merely a Man”; we get pop songs which thankfully grant a reprieve from the doom and gloom of the other tracks, letting optimistic nuggets of human warmth levitate our psyches just enough, even if it is rather fantastical. As I allude to before, Oranges & Lemons almost seems like such a prototypical XTC album that it’s ironic that it took me so long to really warm up to it. It’s the highest mountain to climb in their oeuvre, you might say, with the busiest, most verbose scores and, probably, the artistic beacons of enjoyment positioned farthest away from what anyone might terms as “convention.”

[1] Sorry for the American reference here.

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