Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Respectable Street/XTC



I hate to think that I’m probably becoming one of those people who claim that there’s no music better than the music of their youth, and I certainly would like to believe that I’ve done my best to keep up with what’s new in the world of rock to the extent that I can as someone whose job and daily life really doesn’t “depend” upon knowing, for instance, that the new Decemberists record is perhaps their most disappointing. That said, I’d hold this song, and almost everything XTC did through the mid-80s, up against anything that calls itself “pop music” these days. “Respectable Street” sounds great on Black Sea, the album that also presented the XTC classics “Generals and Majors,” “Love at First Sight,” and “Towers of London”; but this performance amps-up the intensity to the nth degree. Tell me you’ve seen anything better on American Idol or even, for that matter, on the stage of the Music Hall of Williamsburg.