Coat Of Many Cupboards [Box set, Best of]

Coat of Many Cupboards is essentially a closet-cleaning exercise; a 4-disc set comprised mostly of live, rare, and unreleased tracks, scattered (seemingly at random) with a handful of album tracks. ItÕs an embarrassment of riches even for the casual XTC fan.

The first two discs, which cover White Music through Black Sea, are absolutely stellar. The incredible live cuts reveal the live XTC to have been wound incredibly tight, a juggernaut of jerky adrenaline and velocity. The other standouts are variant versions of several tracks from Drums and Wires, nearly all of which eclipse the album versions.

Discs 3 and 4, which cover the remainder of the Virgin years, are a bit spottier. Home demos take the place of the live cuts, and these sometimes shaky efforts will be of more interest to established fans than to newcomers or more casual listeners. That said, thereÕs plenty of great material here too, including a wonderful live version of Yacht Dance and several outtakes from Sklarking. The only real disappointment here is that the Dukes of Stratosphear (XTCÕs tongue-in-cheek psychedelic alter-ego) are represented only by a pair of previously released album tracks; it would have been nice to delve a little deeper into the vaults of the Dukes.

To top it all off, the entire set is beautifully and cleverly packaged. The booklet contains a long essay that focuses, lovingly and in some detail, squarely on the music. Partridge and Moulding also add extensive track-by-track commentary. Highly recommended.

Many of the songs which appear here are in some alternate form. Some were re-recorded with other producers to get more "commercial" versions of songs that could be singles. Sometimes the version here beats what was previously available - the "Ball and Chain" and "Punch and Judy" A and B-side here, for example.

There are too many home demos here of songs that were done better in the studio. This could easily be reduced to a 2 or 3 CD package. But, much good music is on here. XTC deserve an "Anthology" styled treatment like this, in my opinion. They are one of the truly great bands we've been blessed with. Buy this, buy "Rag and Bone Buffet" which is another collection of unused scraps, buy the "Fuzzy warbles" discs of even more demos and unused material on Andy Partridge's APE label.