The Last of the Warbles

With the recent release of Volumes 7 and 8, Andy Partridge's Fuzzy Warbles series is finally complete. They are now offering the complete set at a discounted price, which might be a good deal to anyone who's interested but hasn't ordered any of the volumes. There's also a collector's album you can get, which sounded pretty cool, but not really worth the price for me.

As for the quality of the final two volumes, they don't seem to have quite as many quality unreleased songs than some of the earlier ones. Volume 7 does have "Open A Can Of Human Beans," the new Dukes of Stratosphear song that was recently recorded for charity. It's hardly as full-on psychedelic as the Dukes were on their earlier songs, but it's still really cool. The same volume also has three songs from XTC's proposed bubblegum project, namely "Candymine," "Visit To The Doctor," and "Cherry In Your Tree" (a different version of the latter from the one on the Carmen Sandiego compilation). According to the liner notes, these tracks "are all that remain of the original gum demos," which makes me curious about some of the other titles I remember seeing mentioned in connection with the project. I remember reading that one was called "I Am The Kaiser," which really sounds more like the title of a Falco song than a bubblegum number. {g} "Standing In For Joe" was also originally written for the bubblegum project, but it's much less metaphorically dirty than the other three I've heard. Of course, it's also the only Colin Moulding song I've heard from the project, and he generally doesn't seem to be as much into the innuendo as Andy.

Volume 8 has the melancholy (and unintentionally personal) "I Gave My Suitcase Away," which is really cool. Also good is "The Bland Leading The Bland," and the personalized songs for Wes Long and someone named Karen are interesting.

As for the demos of officially released XTC songs, they're mostly very close to the finished recordings. They obviously needed some polish, and there were some lyrics altered and instruments added, but it largely seems like Andy has a pretty good idea as to how he wanted these songs to sound when making the demos. More interesting to me are the really early demos, from when Andy was just sketching out the songs. There are a few of these included in the Warbles series, but not on these last two discs.

My overall review of the series is that it's pricy, but worth it in the end for XTC fans. Hey Andy, now that you're done with these, how about a new XTC album? It's been almost as long since the last one as between Nonsuch and the first Apple Venus, and the band was on strike at that point.

Record stores have always seemed crazy to me

I went to the library today, and checked out two books. One was Terry Pratchett's Wintersmith. I actually got this book through interlibrary loan, and they called me yesterday to say it had come in. Then last night, I had a dream about being at a library that had a whole bunch of copies of the book, and there were two different covers. I checked out the one with a leopard on it, but I forget what was on the other one. The thing is, there really are separate British and American covers for the book, which might have inspired this part of my dream. People on the discworld community are always complaining about the American covers, but I actually like this one. It's sort of like a generic young adult novel cover, but hey, there's also a drunken, violent blue pixie on it! Kind of a clever mix of the mundane and the fantastic, ye ken? Still, I fail to understand why we don't get the Paul Kidby covers in the States. Anyway, the other book was Dave Barry's Money Secrets. Like Weird Al, Barry is a humorist I got into when I was younger, and have stuck with as I've gotten older. Oddly enough, I've never read any of his fiction, despite having had Big Trouble on my bookshelf for some time.

I've started working out my best of 2006 mix CD. Yeah, I know it's only October, but the only other new album I'm likely to hear this year is The Tragic Treasury. I've noticed that a fair number of the songs I'm putting on here are kind of on the mellow side. Not an adult-alternative or smooth-jazz level of mellowness, but not songs that totally rock out, either. I guess that's largely unavoidable when musicians I like who have done a lot of rockin' stuff in the past, like Frank Black and Scott McCaughey, released somewhat softer stuff this year. Even Neko Case, who did a fair amount of honky-tonk country on her first two albums, has been sticking more to...well, not mellow, but darker and less upbeat stuff as of late.

Speaking of music, jenhime wrote a post where she mentioned that Tower is going out of business. It seems like music stores are much less common these days than they were about a decade ago. Places like The Wall and Sam Goody were ridiculously overpriced, but when I really wanted to get an album on the day it came out, I was sometimes willing to pay $19 for it. I think this might be part of a trend of specialized shops dying out, as people prefer to patronize a-little-of-everything stores. In general, it's a better deal to order just about all non-essential items online nowadays, which is usually fine, but really doesn't equal the experience of going out to buy an actual physical CD on its release date.

( Next, we'll wrap things up with a survey. )