1980-1981: Years of Growth and Ferment Two: XTC's Black Sea
My elder brother gave me a cassette of this with Elvis Costello's "Trust" on the other side in 1980. To say it rocked my world would be an understatement.
I'm not even going to attempt any sort of analysis of this record. When the universe did one of its loop-de-loops twenty years later and he ended up being the author of the liner notes for the Virgin XTC box set he wrote all that really needs to be written on the subject of Black Sea. I suppose I could recite it by heart...
'Nuff said.
posted by Bobby Lightfoot at 16:10
1 Comments:
Man, Bobby, when you get rollin' it's hard to keep up! I was absolutely floored by BLACK SEA when it came out. I was the older brother, in my case, and turned on my bro but it was the same thing: our little lids were flipped. I think with this album XTC moved into pure pop (from so-called "new wave") and really started to show their particular world vision. (I hate to use phrases like that but they seemed to encompass a whole world, past and present, without resorting to an elephantine prog-rock style.) You had one after another shoulda-been-huge-hit pop songs like "Sgt Rock," "Burning With Optimism's Flames," etc. You had your Jules Verne cover, strangely overlaid with a green paper bag that said XTC in big black letters. We played this album to death, and I still love it. I'm going to listen to it again ASAP!
Wish you'd done a longer discourse on this one. But thanks anyway.
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