What an unfortunate note to end a career on.

Of course, at the time of Wasp Star’s recording and release, it wasn’t entirely clear that this would be the last XTC album. This was the band making good on a promise to release two successive and complementary full-lengths, this being the electrified counterpart to Apple Venus Volume 1, released a year earlier. But apart from a one-off digital single released in 2005, and subsequent public announcements by Andy Partridge that Colin Moulding was “not interested in music anymore, and doesn’t want to write,” this became XTC’s last big statement.

As is the case with every album on the bottom quarter of this list, Wasp Star isn’t a complete and utter disaster. In fact, it starts off very strong with a trio of jaunty, blissful tunes that play to Moulding and Partridge’s strengths: a faculty for earworm melodies and lyrics stuffed with witty imagery and lovely sentiment (“In Another Life” playfully pokes at the waning fire of a long marriage with references to Chippendale dancers and romance novel publishing house Mills & Boon).

But even in those songs, something seems amiss. The guitar tones are unnecessarily steely and thin, with the rhythm lines closer to computerized loops rather than actual performances, an issue likely exacerbated by the fact that Dave Gregory played no part in this recording, having left the group in 1999. The drum work of Prairie Prince and Chuck Sabo — two of the many percussionists brought in over the years to fill the seat vacated by Terry Chambers back in 1982 — feel stiff and mechanical. And producer Nick Davis bathes the whole thing in shades of taupe.

After the first three tracks, the band never really finds that lyrical sweet spot again. “My Brown Guitar” is a near-creepy metaphor for Partridge’s dick, and “Wounded Horse” is one of his laziest, expressing his frustration with his lady’s infidelity through horseracing and other equine imagery (“Well my friends all said/ just climb back in the saddle”). Moulding fares no better on his two other tracks, facing his autumn years with rueful rumination (“Boarded Up”) and a strange Ivor the Engine Driver-type turn with another man’s wife (“Standing In For Joe”). A steep drop in quality from the masterful statement that was Apple Venus, this isn’t XTC fading away, this is fizzling out.