XTC
English Settlement

THE REVIEW

Repudiated, despised, rejected eighties. And yet... upon closer inspection, many interesting things happened, and referring to those years as the "dark ages" of pop music seems somewhat exaggerated. Certainly biased. The years of Reagan-era disengagement after the activist binge of the seventies, the disco after the strikes. But also years in which true gems of originality and musical creativity appeared. Take this album, for example. Semi-unknown. Quickly relegated to an ungrateful oblivion despite the universally recognized depth of the duo Andy Partridge – Colin Moulding and despite the genius of the best iconoclastic new wave madness, in its vernacular phase, fused with Beatles-inspired pop.

So, we're in 1982, the year when two albums destined for vast (and above all lasting) success were released, like the Cure's Pornography and Violent Femmes, but both exaggeratedly inferior to the potential expressed or merely suggested by English Settlement. This only contributes to the stereotypical image of the talented and (strangely) unlucky group capable of producing real masterpieces. Back to the record: the gestation is complicated and initially conceived as a double album, later assembled into a single work. It represents a kind of unicum in the production of the Swindon-native group because it is the convergence point between two ages of the band. It is a sort of stylistic summa between their early music (where their schizophrenic writing ability is much more readable) and what their sound will be in a few years (inspired pop songs, but more linear, and a less sporadic use of electronics to fill and embellish slick arrangements).

English Settlement is much more acoustic than previous works, and precisely this lightening allows one to fully enjoy the captivating melodic inventions and the elegant ties between verses and choruses that the Partridge-Moulding duo is capable of embedding in every single track. Result: excessive repeated listening risks leaving deep grooves in memory. And this is not necessarily a bad thing.