Thursday, December 06, 2007

Listen To Your Old 78s

The consistently excellent Rho-Xs music blog has three albums from '78 available for 'sampling'. Unfortunately, neither of of my two favourite albums from that year - 'Parallel Lines' and 'All Mod Cons' - make the final cut, but the albums chosen are worth investigating.

Devo have always left me cold - the studied whackiness can be off putting - but from time to time, I'll hear some music on tv or on the radio, think it's rather good then bite my lip when I discover that it's an old Devo track.

Which sorts of leads me into saying that the XTC album profiled, 'White Music', was never one of my favourite albums from one of my favourite groups for the self-same reason that I've never really got Devo. The music's too jerky and synthetic, and if I was a member of the XTC fanclub, I'd get kicked out for stating that I'm happy that keyboardist, Barry Andrews, went onto pastures new. Maybe XTC did settle back into more conventional new wave poppy songwriting style after his departure, but they were the better group because of it.

Oh, and there's a couple of Kate Bush albums from '78 featured as well in the post.

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