X-Legged Sally - Fired

This is more like it. Fired, the fifth X-Legged Sally album, discards the excess and overreaching of the previous Land of the Giant Dwarfs in favor of a straight-ahead live set that displays the band at its blasting, scorching best. Fired was apparently intended as a final swansong before bandleader Peter Vermeersch closed the book on the group for good, although XLS managed to squeeze out one more CD (Bereft of a Blissful Union) before finally calling it quits. Nevertheless, Fired is a fine career retrospective, drawing some of the best material from Giant Dwarfs, Killed By Charity, and opening salvo Slow-Up (as well as Pierre Vervloesem's Home Made), with everything cleanly recorded by Radio 1 for its Cucamonga program but still imbued with the energy of a particularly wild club date (in this case, at the Cactusclub in Brugge, Belgium). Read More