Live Boots - Live At Emerald City 1981 is supposedly the first of a series of XTC recordings. This show has been circulating among collectors in rather bad sound quality, but none other than Andy Partridge has overseen the mastering for this Record Store Day release (April 18), so it will definitely be an upgrade. Did he sign off on the horrible artwork as well? 2500 copies of the 2LP are available worldwide.
English musicians and music geeks extraordinaire Steven Wilson and Tim Bowness have posted a new episode of their podcast The Album Years. They talk about 1982, discussing albums by XTC, Cocteau Twins, The Cure, Joe Jackson, and a whole lot more. This is part #4 about this year. The pair can be watched on YouTube as well.
Watch the video by Italian band Sterbus tackling the XTC classic Another Satellite. They played it a bit faster than the original and wrapped it in borderline Euro-disco synths.
The cat is out of the bag. Over the last few months a couple of "fake bands" released tracks as part of the Digital Singles Series by the folks at Californian power pop label Big Stir Records. It turns that one band was hiding behind all this: The Armoires, the power pop quintet fronted by label owners Christina Bulbenko and Rex Broome. They had also reached to the other artists on their roster to join in as guest musicians to create what would become Incognito, an album with covers of their musical heroes and a bunch of originals filled with references and lyrical snippets - "Listen to the wind blow / Watch the sun rise" from Fleetwood Mac's The Chain pops up at the end of I Say We Take Off And Nuke The Site From Orbit. The oddest track is the half a minute of audio collage The Armoires Are The Amine Beta Ring Sunshine Harmony Consortium, which does not sound like anything from Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music or The Kinks magnum opus The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society.
It takes some nerve besides the required skills to kick off an album with the John Cale classic Paris 1919. Slightly more rough around the edges than the original, it features the superb harmonic skills of Karla Kane & Khoi Huynh (The Corner Laughers). As a rule of thumb the covers tend to stick close to the originals - why fix a perfect albeit overplayed pop song like Yellow River by one-hit wonder soft rockers Christie. However, they decided to deconstruct and rebuild Senses Working Overtime with ace results. They slowed it down a bit, with call-and-response vocals by Blake Jones, Dolph Chaney and Peter Watts (Spygenius).
