"Heads up, 21st Century popwatchers: welcome to one of your potential futures. As contemporary music meekly sets off round the block once again, there's never been a better time to construct a delectable new monster - but it takes men of vision. Step forward Slap Happy alumnus Peter Blegvad, XTC architect Andy Partridge and anything-but-sleeping partner Stu Rowe. Gonwards is what happens when larkish, literate renaissance men upend their toyboxes of their own imagination ... Album opener The Devil's Lexicon literally creates a monster, alchemising a lurching blues Frankenstein from primeval alphabet soup. Thereafter, Looking At The Sun - which beautifully contends that an orange is "a doll of the sun" - is a mystery jazz futurescape: spindleshanked beatnik art outlines of instruments, with rhomboid blocks of pastel colour breaching the margins (...) and the comical despair of Worse On The Way, a wintry gulag of rags, elegantly rips the living piss out of society'sgloomyprognosticators ("More tunnel to come at the end of the light") ... This IS pop, but not as we know it".
