WASP Star -- the first guitar-laden album from seminal and quirky (but in a good way) 80s stalwarts, XTC, in almost a decade -- announces itself immediately. "Playground," a smart, funny, caustic observation about how, even in adult life, school never really ends, opens the album with one of those crunching power riffs Andy Partridge has reliably come up with throughout his career, going back to their 1979 near-hit "Making Plans for Nigel."
A four-minute rock nugget, "Playground" is a killer kickoff. Then Partridge stunningly tops it with the instant pop miracle, "Stupidly Happy," a wonderful, seemingly impossible mixture of the Stones' "Start Me Up" crossed with a Barney the Purple Dinosaur song. A grungy guitar riff-driven sing-a-long that builds instrument by instrument until it's rolling along like a classic stone, "Stupidly Happy" is made even better by silly, love-besotted lyrics that belie the grunge and end in a joyous harmony payoff with the duo's bassist Colin Moulding.
Moulding takes over for the third song, one of three he has on WASP Star (about his average): "In Another Life," an upbeat and amusing suggestion by husband to wife about the fantasies they can concoct to keep their marriage alive. It's decent, but more than equaled by his other offering, "Standing in for Joe," a funny gimmick song with a simple but catchy beat about a guy who's supposed to stay close to his best friend's girlfriend and ends up doing too good a job.
But most of the songs are Partridge's, as usual, and there's not a single throwaway.
Besides "Playground" and "Stupidly Happy," the consistently pleasing album offers "The Man Who Murdered Love," a recent alternative radio hit that opens the CD's second half: a clean guitar-powered pop song with a twisted optimism and an exultant, instantly unforgettable chorus.
Partridge next changes the band's gears for the herky-jerky rhythms of "We're All Light." It's a great move for arguably the disc's best song, one of those unique XTC tracks that sounds like the band and no one else and uses that distinctive quality in its best execution. Driving drums with nicely timed cymbals and intelligent observations offered lovingly to Partridge's kid bless the song an added emotional resonance, but the music and the beat could do it all by itself.
After three solid but not especially noteworthy songs, including one of Moulding's, Partridge closes WASP Star with a final instant classic, the time-is-triumphant epic in two parts, "The Plow and the Maypole." This six-minute wow brings back The London Session Orchestra, which ruled the musical landscape of last year's acoustic and orchestral comeback (after 8 years of silence), "Apple Venus, Volume One." Looking ruefully over eons of human evolution, Partridge offers some of his most thoughtful lyrics as the song builds and builds, almost to portentous self-parody, when suddenly, effortlessly, it changes gears and become a jubilant and exhilarating race to the finish line.
While perhaps not up to their top-notch standards of Black Sea and Skylarking, XTC has proven with two nearly two hours of new music in less than a year that the band is still at the top of its game. Word is XTC built up a healthy cache of songs while locked into its dispute with Virgin, before getting loose and signing with TVT Records. Let's hope for an album a year, all as good as this one.
