Mummer Music Cd

Xtc - Mummer

See Larger Image

Mummer      Artist : XTC      List Price : $15.98 USD        Your Price : $13.99 USD      ProductGroup: Music      Release Date : 2002-08-06      Studio : Caroline      Label : Caroline      Avg. Customer Rating : (38 reviews)

Reviews Customer Reviews for Mummer      Undiscovered Masterpiece      Rating:      This shouldn't be the first XTC CD you buy. Get Skylarking or English Settlement first. The work "pastoral" gets tossed around, but I think it's just brilliant pop.     Customer Reviews for Mummer Cd      A Regular Listen      Rating:       I am not surprized others have different opinions of this work, but I am amazed when someone comments about the writing. This is possibly the best concept album I have ever heard. Mummer is poetic at so many levels. Its colorful and completely filled with a circus of sound sensations I find so pleasing. When I listen to the intertwined nature of the words and music I think ONOMONOPIA. I am no professional critic, but to listening to "Me and the Wind" and "Great Fire" and not feel the wind and flame - I think you missed it. The album begins with an actual opening tune. "Beating of Hearts" and its toms bouncing throughout opens the door. "Deliver Us From the Elements" is placed in the middle and ties the work together, clarifying the point pretty clearly. Vocals are stretched and pulled into circles and continually emphasized by the drums. I can never listen to the end of that tune without thinking of Todd Rundgren either(W,ATS). I know the middle 6 tunes were not on the album, but they are all so lively and fit like a large intermission. "Procession..." is like a magnet slowly rolling closer, all the while picking up pieces of noisy scrap metal. Porceline sinks,pieces of car doors, a kid's bicycle, and rusted roofing all clanking and scraping against each other. Larger and larger it grows - and then you turn to watch it disappear. As it moves beyond earshot it must be huge. What a cool tune! I don't know if Andy was the originator of the conceptual idea behind "Human Alchemy", but it is certainly a bit of genius. I have been so bored with white guilt for too many years now to feel any personal emotion such as guilt when I hear it, but the clarity of the truth conveyed is unmistakable. It is rare for me to wish I had written something someone else wrote, but Robert Frost's "Dust of Snow" and William Carlos William's "The Red Wheelbarrow" are about the only 2 poems sitting in front of "Human Alchemy" on my list. The closer "Funk Pop a Roll" is a biting, cynical and fun tune to listen to, but if you cannot see the boat and feel the rudder when Andy sings "Feel like a ship with no rudder" in "Me and the Wind", then you missed it. Try and listen to it again and smile.