Pitchfork

Sometime during the stone-grey early months of 1985, the members of XTC stumbled upon a time portal manifested in the form of a wardrobe in Captain Sensible's cobbled and thatched suburban London cottage. What the band was doing there no one can say, but as they stepped inside the portal, making their way past row after row of paisley frocks and multi-hued, four-in-hand ties, they were transported to the year 1967, emerging from the WC of a downtown go-go club.

As luck would have it, the club's house band was absent that particular evening (all four had fallen ill with mononucleosis), so the lads in XTC had no trouble convincing management to allow them to take the stage. Having committed a fair share of the era's repertoire to memory, they (aided on drums by guitarist David Gregory's brother Ian, who happened to be with the band that fateful morn at the wardrobe) won the crowd over easily, and it wasn't long before they secured some studio time.

Christening themselves the Dukes of Stratosphear, and renaming themselves individually as Sir John Johns (Partridge), the Red Curtain (Moulding), Lord Cornelius Plum (David Gregory), and E.I.E.I. Owen (Ian Gregory), the band whipped up an EP's and an LP's worth of dainty psychedelic pop songs, inspired like no other time in their careers. The Dukes were truly of their era, yet wholly XTC-- whimsical, bright, and trippy, but also wry, subtly sarcastic (even time travel couldn't change that), and sophisticated. It was as if they themselves were inventing the very band that would later inspire and influence their proper albums.

Fortunately, before they were suddenly and unexpectedly jerked back to 1985 in the middle of a rehearsal, the Dukes had the foresight to hide their session tapes under a stack of Pat Boone records at a local shop, and there they remained until XTC could pick them back up during the Thatcher administration. The EP, 25 O'Clock, was released later that year, while the remaining ten tracks came out two years later on the Psonic Psunspot LP. Both were eventually collected in their entirety on Chips from the Chocolate Fireball, which has been recently reissued by Virgin.

The above story must be what happened. What else could explain this prime, vintage psychedelia, released during the decidedly un-psych mid-1980s? What else could explain songs like "Bike Ride to the Moon," with lines like, "And we'll pack a tent 'cause it's cold at night/ And I'll share your sleeping bag if I might/ And might be a positive boon/ To protect you from the man in the moon"? (The Small Faces couldn't have put it better.) And how to explain the lack of much, if any, of the stench of 80s production values?

You might think this is a pure joke project on the order of Spinal Tap's "Listen to the Flower People," but play this album alongside, say, Pink Floyd's A Saucerful of Secrets or the Zombies' Odessey and Oracle, and you'll find that, parody or not, it's a great collection of songs that more than measures up.

To put it bluntly, if you can only have one XTC album (by presidential mandate or something), this is the one. That's not a jab at XTC; they've delivered more than their fair share of outstanding releases in their day-- English Settlement and Skylarking, to name only two-- but there's always been a handful of mediocre songs on each album that could stay or go. Not here. All 16 are kaleidoscopic pop gems. It stands as a testament to the band's quirky genius that their loving parody/tribute side project just happens to be responsible for the best music they've ever made.