XTC: Wasp Star (Apple Venus Vol. 2) : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Most of us forget the slights and setbacks we endured at recess. Not Andy Partridge, the principal singer-songwriter of XTC. On "Playground," the ripping first track on Wasp Star, he sifts through long-ago humiliations for clues to his adult personality. As a festival of childish voices taunts him, he recalls being "marked by the masters and bruised by the bullies," and eventually concludes that "you may leave school, but it never leaves you." Such a reverie is vintage XTC, but it would quickly grow tedious if pumped up into the kind of florid pop symphony that this veteran British outfit employed on last year's Apple Venus Volume 1. Instead, Partridge and Colin Moulding return to basic rhythm-guitar rock on Wasp Star, following the contours of their tracks' melodies, resisting the impulse to endlessly embellish -- these twelve songs are streamlined, uncluttered miniatures. They don't all rate with XTC's best (that would be a lot to ask), but an age-old lesson runs through the groaning blues of Moulding's "Boarded Up," the deliriously elongated phrases of "You and the Clouds Will Still Be Beautiful" and the knotted tension of "My Brown Guitar": Sometimes you really can say more by playing less. (RS 842)

TOM MOON