TS: XTC's Black Sea vs. English Settlement

Black Sea by an absolute mile. Never understood why English Settlement is rated as one of the best XTC albums. It's not that it's a bad album but they have such better ones.

Black Sea without any hesitation or doubt. I'll always have a fondness for English Settlement because it was the first XTC album I heard in full, and thus intrigued me enough to check out the rest of the catalogue. However, while I do feel Settlement has a lot of high points (the opening three tracks are ludicrously strong, and Colin wrote two of them!), it's been a long time since I've felt like listening to the whole thing in one go, and it contains one of my least favourite XTC songs ever in 'Leisure'. 'Living Through Another Cuba' is only track on Black Sea that I would even think about skipping. It's one of my top 3 all-time favourite XTC albums, and definitely my favourite of the Chambers years.

*the only track

it contains one of my least favourite XTC songs ever in 'Leisure'

Seconded. In fact, all of side 3 can eat my poo.

Love Black Sea, and it's probably my favorite of theirs after Skylarking.

Settlement, pretty easily. Black Sea's best moment is obviously Travels In Nihilon

Melt The Guns is pretty annoying too. I was always very fond of Knuckle Down but yeah that second side isn't great. Black Sea on the other hand is one of my favourite albums of theirs, probably my third favourite after Skylarking and Drums & Wires.

how can you call a second side with one of the greatest closing one-two punches 'not great'

'it's nearly africa' and 'knuckle down' is the only moment this album even threatens to lose it, although in truth I actually kinda like Partridges aggressively politically correct, right-on steez on this album - it's emphatic enough to avoid accusations of tokenism

also Leisure is amazing

it's this album's sequel to No Language In Our Lungs, which is in fact Black Sea's best moment and maybe XTC's best song, how could I forget above, dear me

'No Language In Our Lungs' is my personal highlight of Black Sea too; to say that I don't see 'Leisure' as a sequel to it would be an incredible understatement. I'm generally in agreement with what's been said here so far: side 3 of Settlement is definitely the weakest side of the album for me; and when I seriously think about it, it's probably the worst side of vinyl XTC ever did.

I mean, look at this: 'Melt The Guns', 'Leisure', 'It's Nearly Africa', 'Knuckle Down'... sure, it's only four songs, but can anyone really think of a side of vinyl on any other XTC album that is worse than this? I sure as hell can't. For what it's worth though, I do like 'Knuckle Down' a lot.

I played in an XTC covers band for fun years ago, we did No Language and it never failed to raise the hairs on my neck at the 'I would have made this instrumental' bit, such a great song.

XP - give me those four over nearly all of Wasp Star anyday

Trying to remember what songs were inexplicably shoehorned into the Black Sea CD running order pre remastering.

Chain of Command, Smokeless Zone, The Somnambulist...err

I played in an XTC covers band for fun years ago, we did No Language and it never failed to raise the hairs on my neck at the 'I would have made this instrumental' bit, such a great song.

― MaresNest, Saturday, August 17, 2013 4:24 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah, that's my favourite part of the song! Another song on Black Sea which I think has a great middle 8 is 'Burning With Optimism's Flames'... the bit where it goes "Now every biiiird and beeee just fuel the fiiiire for me... wo wo wo wo wo wo... yes yes yes yes yes yeeeees!". It just kicks the song up a notch and adds to the giddiness of it all!

xpost:

'Chain Of Command' was on the Drums & Wires reissue... Black Sea had 'Don't Lose Your Temper', which I actually really like.

One day I will get around to chopping together every one of XTC's middle eights in an extended medley.

I even prefer Black Sea to Drums and Wires.

If I ever wanted to get anyone interested in this band, I'd give them Black Sea to represent the touring years and Skylarking to represent the studio years. I think that while both of these albums are not short of "XTC quirk", they're actually two of the most accessible albums the band have made.

it contains one of my least favourite XTC songs ever in 'Leisure'

Leisure is one of my absolute favorites, like I can't think of any other song that communicates the lethargic frustration/occasional burst of angry self hatred that sitting around all day in a bedsit without a job to go to induces. The 'I'VE FORGOTTEN HOW TO USE MY LEGS' bit is one of the best XTC moments,this sense of pathetic anger you get when you spend long periods of tikme onm your own.
I can see why people might hate it, but I think it's wonderful how it's not some cathartic power cord thrash but this grating, perky music hall thing that is horribly out of tune and woozy, like the anger can't be cathartic because you've spent the last three days sitting around your house playing video games and watching TV so the anger can only come out as this pathetic self-hatred.

long periods of tikme onm your own= long periods of time on your own. Reading that b(?ack it seems quite a lot coherent than it did in my head but hopefully I kind of got acroos what I meant(?)

It's been a little while since I listened to it but I remember Black Sea being my least favourite of their early/Chambers era albums, I'm surprised to see so many people rating it over English Settlement. I still love Black Sea but stuff like Generals and Majors and Love at First Sight feels like it should have been B-sides to tracks on Drums and Wires or something, Like it's XTC by numbers or something.

Black Sea has less of the quirky/twitchy tone that makes the preceding three albums but they hadn't started writing songs as gorgeous as 'All of a Sudden' or 'Yacht Dance' yet.

I'm listening to Black Sea now and I love it and feel guilty that I was badmouthing it earlier, beacsue the thread is making me think of them as a TS thing but I love them both, sorry for sounding negative about Black Sea

I discovered XTC after being blown away by "It's Nearly Africa" on WOMAD's Music and Rhythm compilation; I love the sound of it and still think it's a great song. So English Settlement was my first XTC album and a sentimental favorite.

Black Sea's several peaks are better than anything on Settlement, but Settlement gets my vote for the expansiveness and the journey.

(I love "Melt the Guns" too--that relentless rimshot rhythm and crack production tickles my ears enough to not care about obvious lyrics or a super-yelpy Partridge.)

^^largely agree

Eight Model Play on Leisure totally OTM, of course

XTC have a nice line in quietly furious songs/songs with bouncy melodies and angry lyrics- 'That's really Super, Supergirl', 'Wait 'til your boat goes Down', 'Minature Sun', I think they're a band for angry introverts.

their best songs tend to get really fucken angry though, c.f. complicated game, no language

I really love 'Miniature Sun', I've always liked how it goes from that elated middle eight right into that narked off final verse; it reflects its lyrical content very well.

The b-sides around EngSett are the missing side 5

Punch and Judy / Heaven is paved / and the rest..

Tissue Tigers!

Wow, this is tough. I reviewed the tracklisting and its got to be English Settlement for me. I adore every single track, even the of vocals of Leisure and Melt The Guns. It's sequenced perfectly and takes me on a tour of Swindon every time. I'm not even tired of Senses after all these years.

I read that Andy Partridge spent a lot of his childhood confined to bed due to illness. Do you think that this produces a certain kind of personality type? I think Steve Harley also spent a lot of childhood bedridden, and their records both have this almost prissy attention to detail and neatness, they both create the type of music that gets described as 'well-constructed', i think. Does this come from spending large part of your formative years in a restricted environment that you have total control over, not having to interact with other people?

A lot of XTC songs feel '3D' to me, like they construct these detailed but claustrophobic/hermetically sealed worlds/landscapes. If you are a bedridden child you must take refuge in fantasy and imagination to a large extent, so it must be an odd combination of freedom, like you can create worlds that you have total control over, but also restriction. I read a description of XTC's music somewhere that said that though a lot of it is jaunty/whimsical, there's always this sense just under the surface of something being not quite right.

"Black Sea" wins this pretty easily tho "English Settlement" is full of great things. I don't like the sequencing of "English Settlement", opening with two Moulding songs and then having NINE Andy Partridge songs in a row, I'm afraid that's too much Partridge in one sitting for me esp. as so many of the songs are him at his most long-winded and indigestible.

I don't often listen to English Settlement from front to back in one sitting but I've only ever dealt with it as a CD or digital album and usually jump back and forth between different tracks. I can see how it might be unwieldy as a vinyl double album.

I hadn't listened to it in years (and I mean, like, decades) but I listened to in one sitting and that long sequence of AP songs really began to drag

Black Sea. Still never fails to exhilarate and is also one of my all time favorite crunchy guitar records. The albums that preceded it were too squirrelly and right after it they swerved away from that stinging crunch.

Eng Sett has an absolutely killer single lp in it but yeah side 3 ewww.

gonna edit them both into a single LP, for the fuck of it, and also to further demonstrate my preference for ES:

SIDE A

runaways
ball & chain
senses working overtime
jason & the argonauts
no thugs in our house
no language in our lungs

SIDE B

towers of london
fly on the wall
leisure
english roundabout
snowman
travels in nihilon

This thread has just set me off on a massive XTC binge... thanks ILX! (and I mean that with absolutely zero sarcasm, of course)

A lot of XTC songs feel '3D' to me, like they construct these detailed but claustrophobic/hermetically sealed worlds/landscapes. If you are a bedridden child you must take refuge in fantasy and imagination to a large extent, so it must be an odd combination of freedom, like you can create worlds that you have total control over, but also restriction.

Possibly related to that thought, Andy once said that he and Colin determined that Andy was in indoor person who wrote outdoor songs, and Colin was an outdoor person who wrote indoor songs.

English Settlement, side 2 and a half..

1. Blame The Weather (3:37) Written-By – C. Moulding*
2. Tissue Tigers (The Arguers) (3:55) Written-By – A. Partridge*
3. Heaven Is Paved With Broken Glass (5:07) Written-By – Partridge*
4. Punch And Judy (2:44) Written-By – Partridge*
5. Looking For Footprints (3:28) Written-By – Partridge*

this is really close, voting english settlement i guess

like this basically boils down to '60 minutes of XTC at their peak or 40 minutes of XTC at their peak'

I'm with Mark here, English Settlement would be maybe their greatest album (or at least, it would stand up next to Skylarking) had they replaced some of the dead spots on Side 3 with those excellent B-sides, at least "Tissue Tigers" and "The World is Full of Angry Young Men"

I don't like the sequencing of "English Settlement"...

I'm sure I've opined on another XTC thread, but I've only ever owned the American English Settlement and I think the sequencing of that is excellent. That means I'm not overly familiar with "Leisure" or "Knuckle Down" on the seemingly maligned side 3. I have no problems with "Melt The Guns" and "Africa," love them both.

I thought 'Looking For Footprints' was an earlier track, it is descended from a song called Sleepyheads which, I'm guessing, is from Drums & Wires or earlier.

I'm torn on this. Just last week I rediscovered Black Sea and decided it's their most consistently great album - every track is a killer. But English Settlement is both a sentimental favorite and, for reasons that a lot of people have said above, maybe their single best album - it has the journey, the high points, the kind of perfect moment of getting a bit mature and realizing that it's happening, as you hear on songs like "All of a Sudden." I'm surprised nobody's mentioned that song yet - it's a great distillation of realizing you've grown up now, this is it, this is where you are, so what's next? I love that the album doesn't have a "concept." A bunch of English boys basically think about going to Africa and never actually get there. There are no grand schemes, just small realizations. And "Senses Working Overtime" - still one of the all-time greats.

"Knuckle Down" is one of their weakest but best-placed songs. It's nothing special but you need a breather right around there, and the chorus sticks in my head for that reason. "Fly on the Wall" is the opposite - it's a great song but I always skip it.

I seem to remember Dave Gregory saying that he thought the album needed more production, a bit more to the arrangements. It is pretty stripped-down and there's room to do more, and maybe if they'd taken it farther it would have more of that patina of "greatness," but I'm glad they didn't. For one thing I just love the album as it is, and for another, every album that came after it was a bit of a loud mess in one way or another. I don't think they ever truly got the hang of using lots of instruments.

The comparison to Sparks is an excellent one, I think. Two of my alltime favorite bands. Trouser Press' adjectives and descriptors used to describe XTC:

Dissonance, unresolved melodic lines... hiccupping vocals... equally nervous music... hyperactive material
...alternately herky-jerky and menacing. ... funhouse world... more accessible, but still booby- trapped... undanceable rhythms, intricate interplay and gloriously literate lyrics... preachy, wordy... precious, overwrought pop IQ tests...

And that's in a record guide aimed at music nerds likely to actually enjoy them. None of those sound like a band destined for much commercial success. Quirky smart-assery seldom is.

Thinking about my criticism of "Leisure" etc.:

On certain songs on their first three albums, they got aggressive, unmelodic and rhythmically disjunctive (as well as singing in silly voices), there was enough power in the music to put it over. When they try to do pursue that same mode on Black Sea or English Settlement, there's been a loss of energy and an increase in production gloss, and those songs are irritating instead of bracing. They were better off at that point in their career in going for Beatles instead of Beefheart.

...and they would, to diminishing returns, starting in 1986.

Sense is a fascinating song to have as their highest-charting hit, even it's Nigel that has remained their most-remembered. The chorus is one of the most succinct, easy-to-swallow hooks they ever came up with, but the rest of the song is closer to prog if anything, and the verses a strange medieval dirge. I'm surprised the public ate it up so much, and that radio folks made it as far as the end of the pre-chorus

Re: Sparks and XTC, years ago I would tell people that while Sparks were my favorite band of all time, I thought XTC were probably the *best* band of all time, and I think part of the reason I made that distinction was because I could easily understand finding Sparks irritating, but XTC seemed like something most everyone should be able to enjoy. Took me a while to realize they're a lot closer to Sparks in that regard than I'd thought.

same, it's only with some distance that I started to hear why people didn't like them. kind of the same with They Might be Giants, another band whose academic style of songwriting and forced quirkiness irks a lot of people

I'm surprised the public ate it up so much

It was a different time; the masses still had an occasional ear for arty sui generis pop. My go-to example is that Laurie Anderson made it to no. 2 in the British charts in 1981.

as opposed to XTC's later era where their music sounded out of step with nearly everything on the radio - Skylarking sure as hell doesn't sound like a pop record from 1986

Thinking about my criticism of "Leisure" etc.:

On certain songs on their first three albums, they got aggressive, unmelodic and rhythmically disjunctive (as well as singing in silly voices), there was enough power in the music to put it over. When they try to do pursue that same mode on Black Sea or English Settlement, there's been a loss of energy and an increase in production gloss, and those songs are irritating instead of bracing. They were better off at that point in their career in going for Beatles instead of Beefheart.

― Halfway there but for you, Monday, February 14, 2022 6:33 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

This is a good point, definitely a big part of the problem with Leisure for me is that sort of waddling gait it has, it just sounds so bumptious.

The Sparks comparison is interesting – obv. both bands were produced by Todd Rundgren.

relistening to English Settlement now and noticing some things

1) there are a lot of awesome bass lines on this thing
2) Partridge is a total weirdo, I can see why he puts people off. he doesn't really have the voice to do all those sing-songy bits and his phrasing is so bizarre sometimes. he does the Zappa thing a bunch where he writes these rapid melodies and tries to sing every note of them
3) regardless, dude spins some great tunes. Yacht Dance is so damn beautiful. as is All of the Sudden. he's a brilliant lyricist...sometimes
4) No Thugs riff is immense
5) this album sounds dated in a way I never really noticed before. I think Hugh Padgham has a pretty signature style. where he puts the reverb and such.
6) album's theme seems to be anti-progress, sorta like Village Green Preservation Society. feel like Andy saw the world hurtling towards something bad and felt like we'd gone too far. well, can't imagine you'd like how things are now buddy
7) Leisure is the worst track I've always felt, but lately it kinda wins me over until the sax part...what the fuck!!!! Dont do that!!
8) English Roundabout = one of Colin's best tracks? his singing on it is incredible.
9) Fly on the Wall is almost like a throwback to their first two albums. were they trying to replicate Barry's sound or something?
10) bridge on Senses is amazing: "And birds might fall from black skies/And bullies might give you black eyes/And buses might skid on black ice"...brilliant
11) also really love that "we will skid across the surface of the ocean as though we're really seabirds" line on Yacht Dance
12) can't think of anything else

I think it's "wheeling seabirds," isn't it?

1) there are a lot of awesome bass lines on this thing

OTM

Terry Chambers is a hero and i think people who came to xtc in the post TC era don't really understand how massive the guy's sound was in the context of the time. he was also a prog fan and was totally blown away at learning the Bill Bruford had name checked him as a drummer to listen to i guess in the early 80s

TB: I think every drummer is a soup of all their influences -- I mean, that's the whole point, you put all that stuff in, mix it up, and you come up with something that tastes a little different. But you can still taste all the ingredients. I mean, it was good for me to play along with you, to hear those holes and the discipline, because I grew up listening to prog drummers -- Bill Bruford, Carl Palmer, early Phil Collins...

TC: Yeah. In the end, I stopped listening to them. I thought, "Well, I'm never going to be this fucking good, so I'm just going to go me own way now." "I've learned all I can learn off of these guys," I could just never kind of catch up with them, because every time I'd think, "Well, I'm sort of getting on top of this," they'd bring another album out and take it to a new level. So I could never win!

TB: Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. Well, if it's any consolation, I remember seeing an interview with Bruford back in 1980 -- it was right when King Crimson had gotten back together and put out Discipline, and they had asked him for the five albums he was listening to at the time. One of them was Drums and Wires.

TC: You're kidding.

TB: Nope.

TC: Well mate, that really is a jug handle, if I may use such a term! I mean, that's unbelievable!

TB: Yeah, so, a bit of a turnaround there, huh?

TC: Well, I mean ... I'm not even worthy to talk of the man! The man is a living god! I mean, if he was a Greek, he would be a god for sure!

Awww

Now I'm obsessing over the phrase 'that really is a jug handle', I wonder what it means exactly?

It was a different time; the masses still had an occasional ear for arty sui generis pop. My go-to example is that Laurie Anderson made it to no. 2 in the British charts in 1981.

That is the big one... but funny then how XTC had so few proper hits. Towers Of London at the very least should have been done better.

When they were getting in the charts and on the radio in the UK I was between 7-10 years old.

At the age of 15 I bought a second-hand copy of Waxworks and soon realised that I knew all the songs from 'Life Begins...' onwards - and later found out that I knew 'Ten Feet Tall' very well but didn't know it was XTC -

So, hits or otherwise, they definitely penetrated our little household from casual kitchen-radio listening at the time.

"Making Plans For Nigel" was a hit, as was "Sgt. Rock". "Life Begins At the Hop" wasn't but they got on Top of the Pops!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHTMlOtiLSo

a cool thing about the bridge on “senses” is that it secretly changes the key, and then when the pre-chorus comes back it’s a half step higher. cool effect, costello’s “oliver’s army” does a similar thing

My copy of ES (a beige cassette c. 1985 purchased at Rockhead’s in downtown St. Paul) had the aforementioned US tracklisting except with “Yacht Dance” replacing “It’s Nearly Africa”, resulting in an almost perfect album IMO. The only spare track I’d eagerly restore would be “Fly On The Wall”.

1. "Runaways"
2. "Ball and Chain"
3. "Senses Working Overtime"
4. "Jason and the Argonauts"
5. "Snowman"

1. "Melt the Guns"
2. "No Thugs in Our House"
3. "Yacht Dance"
4. "English Roundabout"
5. "All of a Sudden (It's Too Late)"

Wow, weird. That's on wiki: Some versions of the following track listing replace "It's Nearly Africa" with "Yacht Dance", resulting in a nearly identical runtime. Wonder what the reasoning for that was?

Stray thoughts:

- Is "Yacht Dance" XTC's version of acoustic Jethro Tull?
- I always liked Christgau's suggestion that "English Roundabout" is about the convoluted language, not just U.K. traffic.
- "All of a Sudden" sounds like cheery later McCartney mixed with the melancholy world-view of "Eleanor Rigby" or "For No One".

Too quirky, too brainy, too awkward, and just not good-looking enough (sorry, lads). There’s no louche legend to attach to them, no cool image; it’s all about the music, which is most definitely “music for music nerds.”

I've been thinking about this and it's definitely otm. in fact this is what deterred me from getting into the band in the first place. I remember seeing their CDs at the library and researching them online and they just came off so boring. the album covers, their photoshoots in pilgrim outfits, song titles like "Wrapped in Grey". everyone I know who's into them is a huge music dork. in that sense maybe they are more like They Might be Giants? yes, smart, profound, brilliant, all that...but they write music for music's sake and the people behind it are just sorta...normal dudes

moulding seems like a normal guy, idk if partridge fits by any stretch of the definition

Partridge is a normal dude in the sense that he’s a strong example of a “type” everybody knows: the abrasive know-it-all nerd.

Andy was interviewed a few years back for a podcast about Judee Sill. Her song "The Kiss" literally brought him to tears.

i thought it was interesting, watching the footage of the band's last day before they abruptly stopped playing live, that partridge seems together and with it, throughout. a little nervous and uptight but i certainly can understand that, and kind of a dick sometimes to people and a bit self-important, but also we don't see the months and years of touring and PR bullshit. anyway, he seemed perfectly fine, to me. and then, even the set itself when it happens, the songs leading up to it, the very song itself, even (i forget which one) -- to me i'm watching, thinking "when is the show where he walks off?", and then suddenly, he does.

just not at all the kind of "singer leaves set halfway through" kind of thing you're used to, you know?! very XTC in that way, i think. i think there's another xtc thread where every few years, for the last 15, i pop in and state my interest in getting into xtc but also that i've been unable to, or something. still true to this day, although every time i come back it's more familiar and i also hear a bunch of new things i didn't notice a few years earlier. that seems like an outstanding and uncommon quality in a pop band

yeah if you were in the crowd you'd think "wow, guess he had to piss huh?" its weird cuz you listen to those Black Sea era recordings and he was a total showman. however I have taken valium one time and a thought I had is "yes going from this world to that world must be pretty jarring". that said as the Quietus article mentions the bigger story is the insane pressure that was put on those bands back in the day. like I remember an article about TMBG where one of the Johns mentions 1990 as the band's most unhappy period because they spent basically every waking hour on the road or giving interviews getting asked the same 3 questions over and over. I'm surprised more of these folks didn't lose their marbles.

Listening to "English Settlement" again and "Black Sea" is still the better album. Anyway...

I could be wrong but in "Knuckle Down" there's a kind of froglike croaking in the background that sounds like it's a homage to Morricone's "A Fistul of Dynamite" soundtrack.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1TqRbosxro

Meanwhile, more obviously, the spoken word part of "Down in the Cockpit" is inspired by Leonard Nimoy's "A Visit to a Sad Planet".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkAE0lL4DnA

Also "Black Sea" is still a much better album than "English Settlement".

apart from it being slightly less good than English Settlement

There's a good interview with Hugh Padgham about the recording of English Settlement on the latest episode of the XTC podcast.

And, yes, Black Sea is a much better album.

hard question to answer, Black Sea is pretty much perfect in it's (relatively) narrow scope, English Settlement is more ambitious and contains some all-time moments, along with a wealth of songs that reveal more every time you hear them, and yet as an album it does that double LP thing where it really has you then it loses you which is a shame because there are some amazing songs at the end. Only track I'd outright cut is probably "Leisure" though there are a few I wish were shorter. Also I think both albums are obnoxious in particular ways, but Black Sea actually is more annoying than I remembered. when I first got into the band I asked my uncle about them since he's pretty hip to this stuff and he said "oh they're the ones who did that Generals and Majors song right?" and then he proceeds to sing it in the most annoying way possible, actually not unlike how Colin sung it live. I love the song but he has a point.

was interesting to learn that XTC actually had a bunch of hits despite not really being a household name. reading about them online you'd think only Senses & Dear God made a splash.

"Travels in Nihilon" is my favourite XTC song and one of my favourite-ever songs

was interesting to learn that XTC actually had a bunch of hits despite not really being a household name. reading about them online you'd think only Senses & Dear God made a splash.

i still hear 'generals and majors' and 'mayor of simpleton' and 'king for a day' in local stores all the time, they seem like mainstays of slightly hip retail playlists

only on ILM could 26 people be so wrong

otm @frogbs

I was going to say that I prefer Black Sea — and it is their rockingest record, which is my sweet spot -- but see that it too has some of that characteristic annoyingness that also comes up on English Settlement. Still, many really great songs on both and texturally I think they never topped Runaways, Jason and the Argonauts, English Roundabout, Snowman. Fretless bass + 12-string are super important on this one, and I don't think they ever were as important later (though I could be wrong).

On the other hand, to me at least it inaugurates a pastoral vibe that takes over on the last two records (which I can't deal with at all), though is magnificent on Skylarking (especially the original version with the perfect Mermaid Smiled).

thing is i adore both albums and they are my favourite band ever basically, but if i had to rank the albums black sea would probably fall into the back half. it's not as diverse as - well most xtc albums really, not least those either side of it. it's an album of superior power pop + cuba and travels as excellent diversions (those two and optimism's flames are my favourites). english settlement has only one track it could arguably do without (leisure obv) but that still leaves 14 tracks i adore. but while both of my two least favourites on black sea - language and towers - are better than leisure, that's still two relatively minor tracks i might be tempted to skip now and then. and most xtc albums don't even have that many.

"Living Through Another Cuba" is the only song on the album that annoys me ymmv

otoh "No Language in Our Lungs"? Best XTC song ever.

Could live without all of Side 3 from "English Settlement" tbh, although "Knuckle Down" is OK I suppose. "Down in the Cockpit" can go too.

"Language" and "Towers" are my two favorite tracks on the album! but then I usually skip fgti's favorite. another no consensus band

i also have always loved "burning with optimism's flames"

yeah was always surprised that one wasn't a single as well

I remember being quite unimpressed with the second disc of English Settlement whereas Black Sea has good songs all the way through

as Tom mentions it's really Side C that's the problem, I mean Side D is as great as the rest, though I know some people get annoyed with "Down in the Cockpit"

what's frustrating about that is they had some really good B-sides/non-album singles floating around at this time, "Tissue Tigers" especially. maybe "Punch and Judy" and "Blame the Weather" could've made it as well

settlement bums me out. it has the highs of the best xtc records and the most opportunities for the band to stretch out to 5 minute pseudo-jams, but for me has too many ultra corny songs and sounds, similar to mummer and big express and everything post dukes.

i know i'm an outlier in that i think leisure is great - including the atonal sax part illustrating the headsplitting boredom causing mental illness (this seems to be a metaphor for partridge's impending desire to retire but it will make him crazy) and the lazybones tin pan alley interpolation at the end. but i usually skip runaways, guns, africa, knuckle down, and cockpit. runaways in particular bothers me: the don't crys just make me wince, the song is trying to be sad or something and i just don't buy the emotion in it, and more importantly, the theme of the song is just so conservative and mother knows best, stay at home, don't rebel, that's too worrisome. it seems to declare this entire album's project is to reject xtc's punk's rebellious spirit and connect with the past.

one thing settlement has going for it... it seems to encompass all the seasons. you can put it on in spring, summer, winter, fall. i think i'd like it more if they included some of the b-sides as album tracks, particularly over rusty water, heaven is paved with broken glass, punch and judy, and tissue tigers. some more spikiness would do the album well, i think.

never got that impression from "Runaways" myself, it's very clear that the subject is running away from a very abusive situation

A "no consensus band" is right. I dig Leisure, too, fwiw.

fwiw I dig a lot of XTC's "annoying" songs but not that one for some reason. I'll even defend "Wounded Horse"