Eponymous albums usually herald a debut or a stylistic sea change. Robyn Hitchcock's 22nd studio LP is neither, but it embraces elements of both...
...Recorded in Nashville with pop sorcerer Brendan Benson, it's a distillation of the 64-year-old surrealist's entire career, and easily his most vibrant collection of new music since the early 1990s -- his last outing, 2014's Man Upstairs, saw Hitchcock delivering an enjoyable, yet relatively amorphous set of half-covers/half-originals under the tutelage of the great Joe Boyd. The obvious reference points here are Underwater Moonlight-era Soft Boys and early solo outings like Element of Light and Black Snake Diamond Role, but there are more than a few tips of the hat to his time on A&M in the late '80s -- lead single "I Want to Tell You About What I Want" wouldn't have sounded out of place on Globe of Frogs or Queen Elvis. Always an underrated and inventive guitar player, Benson gives Hitchcock plenty of room to flex his six-string muscles, and he digs into psych rock/jangle pop confections like "Virginia Woolf," "Detective Mindhorn," "Time Coast," and "Mad Shelley's Letterbox" with the fleet-fingered, double-tracked glee of a man who just rediscovered Revolver. Hitchcock's adopted hometown of Nashville looms large on the Grant-Lee Phillips-assisted, pseudo-honky tonk number "I Pray When I'm Drunk," and Russ Pahl's weepy pedal steel paints golden sunsets over the lovely "Sayonara Judge" and the equally breezy "1970 in Aspic," but as Hitchcock states in his typically verbose liner notes, his songs are "English myths, seen from abroad." Nowhere is that more apparent than on "Raymond of the Wires," a eulogy for his novelist, screenwriter, and cartoonist father, and an elliptical, psych-pop mini-masterpiece that skillfully wields both nostalgia and wonder. No longer the hyper-prolific, Byzantine food-, sex-, and death-obsessed Syd Barrett-phile of old -- well, maybe just a little bit -- Hitchcock has settled into a sort of seasoned eccentricity, and this economical, late career gem proves that he's still got plenty of Madcap Laughs left in the hopper. - Review by James Christopher Monger
trax:
01 I Want to Tell You About What I Want 02 Virginia Woolf 03 I Pray When I'm Drunk 04 Mad Shelley's Letterbox 05 Sayonara Judge 06 Detective Mindhorn 07 1970 In Aspic 08 Raymond and The Wires 09 Autumn Sunglasses 10 Time Coast
"Sunday Never Comes" 2019 - 12"/45rpm EP
After carefully scanning wider Tennessee for local Beatles freaks, Hitchcock found Buddy Hughen, Patrick Sansone and Ryan Brewer to back him on these new tracks, which were recorded in Nashville in December 2018. - bandcamp
trax:
01 Sunday Never Comes 02 Take Off Your Bandages 03 Take Off Your Bandages (Extended Version)
"Although this has a similar track list to "Drive It Live," these are the original studio recordings from their first two LPs. Drive It Home and Missing Links. A high energy guitar three-piece, Link Protrudi & The Jaymen are heavily Link Wray influenced and eight of these titles are Wray compositions. The full-on Wray blast is the band's forte, but midway there are a couple of very tasty surf originals in "Psyclone" and "Bandito." And yes, "Chaquita" is the Dave Clark Five's great instrumental. DC5 are also represented here by "No Stopping," although you might easily confuse it with one of the Linkster's pieces. "Psyclone" reappears as an alternate take without the spooky spacey organfills but lacks a little of the atmosphere because of it. With no vocals and compositions of a consistently quality. Drive It Home is probably the greatest album Link Wray never made. - Alan Taylor MISTY LANE #17 (Italy)
Link Protrudi & The Jaymen:
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