* Black Sea, XTC. XTC's high-tech idolatry, exhibited on last year's Drums and Wires in songs like "Roads Girdle the Globe," metamorphosed in 1980 into full-scale battle hysteria; Black Sea is the best of the new war music. "Generals and Majors" overlays "Bridge Over the River Kwai"-style corps whistling on a bouncy anthem:

Generals and Majors always

Seem so unhappy 'less they got a war

Generals and Majors ah ah

Like never before are tired of being actionless

Calling Generals and Majors

Your World War III is drawing near

If "Generals and Majors," with its hummable hook and over-blunt satire, is the stuff of a hit single, "Living Through Another Cuba" is the single best song the impending hostilities have yet inspired. A rising-and-falling arpeggio of treated guitar and human wailing leads into an over-heated, pseudosalsa beat, as Andy Partridge half-talks the lyrics:

Living through another Cuba

It's 1961 again and we are piggy in the middle...

This phenomenon happens every 20 years or so

If they're not careful your watch won't be the

Only thing with a radioactive glow

I'll stick my fingers in my ears

And hope they make it up before too late

If we get through this lot all right

They're due for replay, 1998.

For so fatalist a song, "Living Through Another Cuba" has remarkable energy: an overwrought disco tune with a message, it sounds like music to accompany St, Vitus' Dance--or the Dance of Death.