XTC Album: “Skylarking”

This XTC album represents one the band's most cohesive, consistent and creative albums. Easily one of the best albums of the 1980', Andy Partridge's songs are consistently interesting and delightful to listen to as well. Colin Moulding's four contributions to this 14 track cd are amoung the best songs he has written.

A frequently overlooked fact about Moulding's material; although less prolific than Partridge, his material is on a par(and on occasion better than)his bandmate's song. Dave Gregory contributes masterful playing and arrangement ideas(as does producer Todd Rundgren).

The sound on this audiophile cd puts the original issue on Geffen to shame. It is clear after listening to this cd, that the Geffen original was mastered from a second generation copy, or a slightly improved lp master. The only compliant is that this cd(like the Geffen original)substitutes "Dear God" for 'Mermaid's smile". Although "Dear God" is a fine track(and became their first charting single since 1980's ENGLISH SETTLEMENT in the U.S.), it doesn't messure up to "Mermaid" and creates a sense of discontinuity on the cd. Instead, it would have been nice to have this cd as originally issued on vinyl in the U.S.(and cd in the U.K.)with "Dear God" as a bonus track. Mobile Fidelity, however, usually doesn't do this when remastering and reissuing cd's.

Nevertheless, this is one of the best sounding cd's to be issued from Mobile Fidelity and, again, puts the original Geffen issue to shame. Unfortunately, this album is not a big enough seller for Geffen/MCA to consider reissuing in a remastered edition(at least at this time). Even if Geffen did reissue SKYLARKING, it is unlikely they would be able to surpass the sound quality of this disc unless using new technology.

One of the best written, produced and performed albums of the 1980's and XTC's career, this album would become the benchmark against which latter day XTC albums would be measured. As such, this album is a classic and in the same league as the band's best albums WHITE MUSIC, BLACK SEA, ENGLISH SETTLEMENT and THE BIG EXPRESS.

This is one of my favorite albums of all time, ranking up there with Dark Side of the Moon, Tommy, and others.

But, this is only true of the original release that had mermaid smiled and not dear god. I think Todd Rundgren made a big mistake because Dear God ruins the mood and the general theme of the album. It was placed there for purely commercial purposes.

If you can get a copy of Skylarking with the original tracks, ie mermaid smile, get that instead. I think that's only available outside of the US.