Editorial Reviews
Music Review:
Music Review
Bluebeard's Castle / Violin Sonata
Body Rock [CD-single] [Import]
Best of Jazz Jamboree V.2 [Import]
Sir Arthur Bliss: Checkmate (Complete Ballet); Mêlée Fantasque
Amazon.com
Oranges and Lemons, from 1989, is a fantastic record, a lucid, technicolor sprawl of modernized Beatleisms and airbrushed psych-pop confectionary. Commercially, it was such a shame Tears for Fears had exactly the same idea at exactly the same time. Appropriately, given its title, several of the songs on Oranges and Lemons deal with Andy Partridge's newly acquired parental status (the jazzy "Pink Thing" is a cunning double-entendre about fatherly pride and his penis) as well as wryly address the wider failings of the world into which our children are born. Yes, like some sherberty, fructose-flavored lozenge, Oranges and Lemons is both bitter and sweet. But unquestionably excellent, as witnessed by the Byrds-like village-idiot love song "Mayor of Simpleton" and other highlights like "King for a Day" and "Poor Skeleton Steps Out." The Eastern mystique, serpentine guitars, and "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" style chorus of "Garden of Earthly Delights" is conceivably what John, Paul, George, and Ringo would have sounded like if they'd hung around a little longer with the Maharishi. As for the dreamy, green-field tourist brochure panoramas of "Chalkhills and Children," think Brian Wilson drifting over the English countryside in a hang glider. --Kevin Maidment
Album Description
24-bit remastered reissue of 1989 album. 15 tracks, including "The Mayor Of Simpleton."