Album Review: XTC – Skylarking (2024 edition)

A widely acknowledged peak in the work of XTC – a group that never made a bad album, and rarely made one less than great – Skylarking has nonetheless long been mired in controversy. For those who focus merely (“merely”) on the music itself, these kerfuffles may well have passed by unnoticed. But for the rest of us, the album’s brilliance has come along with questions about the extent to which Todd Rundgren’s involvement was positive or not.

Making clear at the outset that I’m on Team Todd on this one – not unquestioningly so, but rather seeing his input as critical to the album’s greatness – I’ll mention the reservations in passing. One, Andy Partridge seems to have bristled at some of Rundgren’s ideas; while he is the one who helped shape the song sequence into something resembling a conceptual work (or at least a song cycle), he ruffled some feathers in doing so. Two, and if accurate this one is truly problematic – by some accounts, someone misaligned the polarity (or somesuch) so that the final mix of Skylarking was rendered out of phase.

As someone who believes that WAVs sound better than MP3 files, I must admit that I have never noticed any sonic shortcomings on my original vinyl copy of Skylarking. So to my ears there wasn’t anything that required “fixing.” That said, any time Steven Wilson takes a crack at remixing an album, I’m up for it. The man knows what he’s doing, and his results are never short of amazing.

So it is that a new (or newish) Wilson remix of Skylarking appeared in 2016. Critics were rapturous in their enthusiasm: the music was as great as it had always been, the polarity issue (such as it was) was corrected, and Wilson’s mix brightened things further, revealing previously unheard elements. That would have seemed to have been the final word on reissues as such, as there weren’t any unreleased bonus tracks languishing on a shelf somewhere.

Alas, in 2024 an updated update did appear. A new two-disc set packaged a Blu-Ray disc containing Wilson’s 2016 mix, his instrumental mix and his Surround 5.1 mix. Added to those are two new Steven Wilson mixes: one in Dolby Atmos, and another, an instrumental rendering of same. For those without a system on which to enjoy all that – or for people with (as the saying goes) only two ears, a CD included offers the 2016 stereo mix. In all, it’s pretty wonderful, and to these two ears the 2016 mix does sound a bit nicer that the original. My life would have been just as full without it, but it’s welcome nonetheless. And if these 2016 and 2024 remixes help bring the peerless work of XTC’s Skylarking to new audiences, that alone will have more than justified the project.