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| Artist: Xtc
Label: Caroline
Category: Music
List Price: $15.98
Buy New: $9.67
You Save: $6.31 (39%)
New (35) Used (11) Collectible (1) from $8.72
Rating:  63 reviews
Sales Rank: 36270
Format: Original Recording Reissued, Original Recording Remastered
Media: Audio CD
Discs: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 5.6 x 5 x 0.5
MPN: 50690
UPC: 724385069024
EAN: 0724385069024
ASIN: B00005ATHO
Release Date: May 14, 2002
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand new Item. CD, DVD, Book, VHS more than 400 000 titles to choose from. ALL days Low Price !
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 6-10 of 63
 Overrated album by one of the most overrated bands September 10, 2004
Noel Pratt (Washington, D.C., and better places)
4 out of 25 found this review helpful
I've given fair listenings to both this and ENGLISH SETTLEMENT. I wanted to like the stuff, but is Partridge trying to be the English boy-next-door or something? The lyrics are clearly trying to be clever but the rhymes fall flat for me. And the music is trying to break through to some kind of originality, to add a dash of the progressive to the pop, but that fails too, goes nowhere. And that voice, ohhh...like an early 80s New Wave Brit guy trying to say something alternately playful and serious but in that rounded, wry fashion that drags the notes. And why is he so...happy?
ARGUABLY the best..... December 1, 2004
C. Cooper (Brooklyn, NY United States)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
Arguably, this is XTC's best. XTC has used Andy Partridge's "strictly studio" mentality quite to their advantage--listen to the way "Summer's Cauldron" and "Grass" bleed right into one another, as well as "Ballet for a Rainy Day" and "1000 Umbrellas." This is really an album that works as a whole and still allows us to enjoy the songs individually. I'm really torn between this album and The Big Express--although, there really is no sense in arguing over which XTC album is the best....
"Skylarking": The Holy Grail of Pop Music May 24, 2002
Gavin B. (St. Louis MO)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
XTC has always forged an idosyncratic career path which has delighted their fans and left others puzzled. There is a perception that the band is essentially a studio creation of a group of gifted reclusive musicians who refuse to tour because they can't cut it as a live band. In the early 90s I saw Aimee Mann coax the nortoriously stage phobic Andy Partridge out to play a few songs and he turned out to be a riveting performer as he blazed through a half a dozen XTC songs and blew the roof off the joint. Still XTC refuses to tour in support of their releases and leaving them with a hand full of devotees who count their XTC albums among their most precious possessions. "Skylarking" is the Holy Grail of lost treasures of 1980s music. I've heard a lot of comparisons to "Sgt. Peppers", but folks, this is better than the Beatles tour de force. "Skylarking" is as close to high art as pop music will ever get."Skylarking" is a song cycle which depicts a young man's rite of passage through the seasons of love into heartbreak and eventually disillusionment. Todd Rundgren is the cement that keeps "Skylarking" from imploding under the weight of it's big ideas. Todd's studio brilliance begs the question of why he was never able to jump start his own career. The remastering has added even more clarity to what was a "crisp as an autumn morning" original master. Todd's separtion of the vocal tracking rivals some of Brian Wilson's most inspired harmony mixes of the "Pet Sounds/Smiley Smile" era. There are charming locaction sounds like chirping crickets and singing birds that capture the esessence of XTC's eccentric pantheistic vision. If you are reading this review, you are probably among the converted. If there was any justice in this world, "Skylarking" would be grounds enough for XTC to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I have a feeling Andy and Colin could care less, but I do.
One of XTC's three best albums October 18, 2004
Music Lover 1963 (Anaheim, CA USA)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
This along with Oranges and Lemons and English Settlement is my favorite XTC album. It has a lush, pastoral quality and they never sounded quite this way before. Except maybe for Mummer. It never sounds dated and is timeless in its essence and themes that it explored. Every song weaves a continuous story about the cycle of birth, life and death and contains some of their best lyrics. Cynicism and despair never sounded so good.
 XTC Skylarking GOOD ALBUM March 21, 2005
joe larkin (pa)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Skylarking, XTC had traveled from the urban to the rustic. A concept album about an English summer day, Skylarking sounds like the warm, luscious post-Beatles masterpiece Paul McCartney never made. Goaded by tyrannical producer Todd Rundgren, a fellow Beatles fanatic, XTC slipped the bounds of current trends once and for all. Alive with invention and impossibly sensual, the album is pure rock & roll Wordsworth. The lively heresy "Dear God," a fluke college-market hit, didn't make Skylarking a major success, but it did prompt unusual interest in its successor. Oranges and Lemons, from 1989, reimagined Sgt. Pepper's on XTC's home ground, England's mystical West Country. Oranges was Skylarking with more psychedelic studio effects, and it includes "Pink Thing," singer Andy Partridge's love song to his penis. The XTC career arc - from gawky new-wavers to bumpkin savants to special-reserve songwriters for the listening cognoscenti
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