Album Review: XTC: Wasp Star: Apple Venus Volume 2 (2000) Tvt Records

by Joseph Taylor

XTC
Wasp Star: Apple Venus Volume 2

List Price: $16.97 Our Price: $11.88 You Save: $5.09 (30%) Availability: This title usually ships within 24 hours. Audio CD (May 23, 2000) Original Release Date: 2000 Number of Discs: 1 Tvt Records; ASIN: B00004SWHU

XTC returned to recording last year with "Apple Venus Vol. 1" after a seven-year hiatus brought on by a contract dispute with their previous record label. Their newest disc,  "Wasp Star (Apple Venus Volume 2)" is, as the subtitle suggests, a continuation of the earlier disc. Apparently the plan was to release a two-disc set, but that idea was dropped, so we have two volumes, two contrasting approaches to songcraft.

“Wasp Star”announces its difference from its strings and keyboards based predecessor in the first cut, “Playground”. A slightly distorted guitar gives way to several sharp drum shots and settles into a happy pop groove that Andy Partridge, the band’s principal songwriter, immediately undercuts with the song’s opening lines:

I climb up, spending daylight
Slide down bankrupt on the other side
Some sweet girl playing my wife
Runs off with a boy
Whose bike she’ll ride.

Throughout the album Partridge maintains this dichotomy between bouncy optimism and broken-hearted cynicism.

It wasn’t until I listened to both discs that I realized how few of  “Apple Venus Volume 1’s” tracks contain drums or percussion—or how low they’re mixed on the tracks that do use them.  Since “Wasp Star” is a guitar and drums based disc, my initial impression was that it was more densely recorded than “Volume 1,” almost Spector-esque.  Upon closer listening, I realized that my impression was wrong; there’s more going on in “Wasp Star” but there’s plenty of space between each of the details.

Of course, it’s the details that make an XTC record. You can return to their records repeatedly because they reveal new things each time you listen to them. And, while I hate to draw an obvious comparison, their records consistently show a “Sgt. Pepper’s” influence, not so much in the songwriting—which I think compares favorably to the Beatles—but in the little bits of “business” that one hears in the recording. A chair scrape here, a little bit of discreet applause there, the sound of footprints in the fadeout—tiny examples of aural wit that bring playfulness and levity to their darkest musings.

As I noted above, those musings run pretty dark through “Wasp Star,” as they did through “Apple Venus Vol. 1.” I don’t want to sound like I’m making a bid for the editorship of “Random Notes” but my guess is that Andy Partridge was cuckolded. In addition to the lyrics I already quoted, other songs point the way:

Well I stumbled and I fell
Like a wounded horse
When I found out
You’d been riding another man.

- From “Wounded Horse” on “Wasp Star” 

or 

H-A-T-E Is that how you spell love in your dictionary
K-I-C-K Pronounced as kind
F-U-C-K Is that how you spell friend in your dictionary
Black on black
A guidebook for the blind

- From “Dictionary” on “Apple Venus Vol. 1

In the case of these two songs, I think such open cynicism leads to the weakest cut on each of the discs.  Usually Partridge is able to keep his anger in check and can even express romantic hope, as in “Stupidly Happy”:

I’m stupidly happy
Everything’s fine
I’m stupidly happy
My heart pumping wine.

Or he couches his vitriol in clever wordplay, as he does here in “I’m the Man Who Murdered Love”:

I put a bullet in his sugar head
He thanked me kindly
Then He lay down dead
Phony roses blossomed where he bled
Then all the cheering angels shook my hand and said

I’m the man who murdered love…

Colin Moulding, the other half of XTC (guitarist Dave Gregory left the band during the recording of “Volume 1”), contributes three songs to “Wasp Star.” Their spare arrangements make them a comfortable bridge between this and the previous disc, but I’m not sure his writing on either disc approaches his contributions to earlier XTC efforts.  What I am absolutely sure of is that he is one of the very best bass players ever (listen to Sam Phillips’s wonderful “Martinis and Bikinis” for further proof). A riff based song like “Wounded Horse” would be considerably less interesting without his contribution, but his playing catches your ear on the best tunes, as well.