Recording review - Robyn Hitchcock, Love From London (2013)

Surrealistic pop and unforced eccentricity

Robyn Hitchcock is like a lost uncle who wanders by every now and then on a cometary path. As uncles go, he’s a little dotty, but that’s part of his charm. Even turning 60, he has a childlike wonder that resonates. Sometimes, it seems like he’s starting one of the same old stories from an earlier visit, but they always drift sideways and turn out to be more interesting than expected. After all these years, his eccentricity hasn’t worn thin. His latest release, Love From London proves both familiar and unexpected, with a heady mix of surrealistic pop and unaffected psychedelia. While any of these songs could fit on his earlier albums, his lyrical turns are still full of powerful imagery and his perspective is always fresh. On “Be Still”, he captures a static moment of observation and spins it out into full reverie: “What is swimming through her mind as she sits alone?/ As beautiful as silence and as quiet as a stone.” The pop simplicity and steady bowing on the strings frame the frozen tableau as each detail crystallizes into place. “Her eyes are a dark as berries and her skin is charcoal brown/ She gazes to the future, out to where the sun goes down.”


This combination of honed lyrics and intriguing music has been Hitchcock’s stock in trade for decades since he started fronting his psychedelically-slanted punk band The Soft Boys in the mid-‘70s. After the band fell apart in 1981, he slid into a steady solo career that wafted through MTV popularity and eventually picked up occasional partnerships with R.E.M.’s Peter Buck and Scott McCaughey of the Young Fresh Fellows. Like Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett and 13th Floor Elevators’ Roky Erickson, his natural quirkiness gave his music an off-kilter edge and an outsider appeal. But grounded in a way that Barrett and Erickson never were, his musical output has been much more consistent. Over the years, his catalog has evolved into a sweet and sour mix of tunes that meld whimsical non sequiturs, off-beat subjects and pop aesthetics. While his songs are instantly recognizable, they have an artisanal quality that renders each one distinct.


The tracks on Love From London are little musical islands, each with a self-contained eco-system of pacing and mood. Heartbeat percussion drives the pensive melancholy of “Harry’s Song”. Despair builds as the piano repetition erodes any sense of well-being. On another corner of the archipelago, “Fix You” revives Beatlesque psychedelia with shades of “Baby, You’re a Rich Man” backed with motorik Krautrock drumming. The elliptical social commentary demands to know, “Now that you’re broke/ Who’s gonna fix you?/ Fix you up?” But the most disorienting corner of his map is found in the innocently named “I Love You”. Insistently trippy, the groove circles and reverberates, creating an inescapable mental cage. If this were the indoctrination song for a radical cult, no amount of deprogramming would obliterate the trance-like echoes. The first verse warns of assimilation as he gleefully sings, “Tendrils grow between us/ Tendrils you can’t see/ I’m dissolving into you/ You’re growing into me,” which casts the droning mantra of the title in an ominous light. The robotic bass line and descending scratch of violin intensify the uneasy feeling, but he somehow makes paranoid surrender sound appealing.

As Hitchcock regales us with tales from this foreign land, it’s nice to relax into the rhythm of his songs. Quaintly quirky but unforced, Love From London flows like a dream. Like the rest of his oeuvre, it serves as another set of his “paintings you can listen to."

(This review first appeared on Spectrum Culture)

Concert review - Quintron and Miss Pussycat with Dream Police, No Funeral

12 July 2012 (Hi-Dive, Denver CO)
I don't put a numerical ranking on my reviews because I try to separate my tastes enough to recognize quality, even it's not what I like the best. Concerts are harder to grade than albums, though. For example, should the opening acts affect the score for good or bad? In this show, the headliner killed, but the first opening act...well, not so much.

No Funeral

No Funeral featured some cool laser effects, along with a fog machine, which gave the Hi Dive a rave look. Aside from a touch of glow stick style tubing wrapped around his arms, laptop noise artist No Funeral (Warren Bedell) didn't make any other concessions to "performance".

His brief set focused on deconstructing pop songs like the Lovin' Spoonful's Summer in the City. In DJ mode, he diced in overdriven vocals, electronic tones, and echo artifacts. Bedell met his noisy goal, but his set didn't do much for me or provide much support for the other acts.

Dream Police

The name "Dream Police" conjures up images of a Cheap Trick tribute band. That might have been an interesting choice for an opener, but the raw punk thrash that the band brought was more welcome. In recent years, punk pop bands like Blink-182 or Green Day are the strongest influences for punk scene, but Dream Police opted for a more old school, hardcore sound.

The quick pace, inarticulate shouted vocals, and high energy recalled classic bands like The Exploited and GBH. It was a reminder of the cathartic power of punk.

The dual guitar line up gave the band a solid wall of sound. Dream Police was also unique because it's rare to see a female punk guitarist. When she added backing vocals, it created some great whipsaw moments. The call and response on their opening song, R U OK?, got the crowd moving. This was a much better lead in for Quintron's set.

Unfortunately, Dream Police's set aborted early. The drummer broke a stick without any spares. He still managed one more song, but then he had to give it up. It's good to leave an audience wanting more, but 16 minutes was too damn short.

Quintron and Miss Pussycat

As is typical for the band, the set started with Miss Pussycat's performance art. In puppet form, she addressed the crowd:

Hello, everyone. My name is Miss Pussycat. I'm going to do a puppet show for you tonight about a grizzly bear that wanted to go into outer space. Then, we'll have a dance party with Quintron.

Miss Pussycat reminded me of Amy Sedaris (Strangers With Candy): her show was deliberately primitive and rough, but hysterically funny and entertaining. Quintron's electronic soundtrack and sound effects supported the show, which featured cannibal parties on the moon with Mother Nature, vampires, and a happy ending on "Magical Nebula Rainbow Land". The surreal show cleared our minds of all outside influences and prepared us for the music.

Quintron's music was a brilliant Frankenstein mix of punk energy, raw power, Wall of Voodoo/Talking Heads quirkiness, and retro sounds of soul, blues, and Cajun rhythm. He's referred to it as "swamp tech", which seems fitting. Like a one man band, Quintron played organ, various synthesizers and a partial drum kit. A key element of his sound was his invention, the Drum Buddy, which is a light activated drum machine/optical theremin. With all of these toys, Quintron was like a juggler. With his hands fully occupied, he might whip a booted foot up to kill the drum beat at the end of a song.

Despite all his toys, though, Quintron was a great performer. Rather than losing himself in the technical detail, he connected with the audience. His grooves got the crowd dancing and created a sort outsider rave vibe. While the music bounced around through B-52's new wave pop, rootsy revival soul, uptempo swamp blues, and Mojo Nixon-style manic outbursts, the crowd fed off the dance party atmosphere and embraced the quirk.

Miss Pussycat's backing on vocals and maracas was also vital to the balance. Her stage persona tended to be cheery and spacy, but she had a good range. On Swamp Buggy Badass, she summoned a catty 1950s tone and kicked off the vocals. Then, as Quintron took the lead, they slipped into a call and response that ratcheted up in intensity. After Quintron set the music on autopilot, he came out and accosted the crowd and it became a tribal rite.

The musical climax was an amazing Drum Buddy solo, with Quintron showing off the range of the instrument. The pair finished out a strong set and even played a solid encore. Quintron himself summed up their aesthetic perfectly: "We say 'yes' to everything." The buzz from this show lasted the 70 minute drive home and sent me off to dream filled night once I got to bed.

More photos on my Flickr.

CD review - Boston Spaceships, Let It Beard (2011)

Remarkably cohesive double album encompasses classic psychedelia, prog rock, and trademark GBV sounds

If Robert Pollard sleeps, he must take catnaps between takes in the studio. This year, Pollard has already released Lord of the Birdcage as a solo album (review here), The New Theory of Everything (with Mars Classroom), Waving at the Astronauts (with LifeGuards), and Space City Kicks (another solo album). Now, he's releasing a double album with Boston Spaceships, Let It Beard.

Prolific as he is, Pollard continues to surprise his audience with interesting, engaging songs. I can't imagine another artist who can release so much material on a regular basis and still seem relevant. Some of the 26 tracks on Let It Beard are short enough to feel like teases, like Juggernaut vs. Monolith, Toppings Take the Cake, or Pincusion. But each of these brief songs (the longest is 1:15) are full songs filled with driving, garage rock energy that compares well to the longer tracks on the album.

The first three tracks give a taste of the rest of the album. Blind 20-20 starts with a Robert Fripp/King Crimson, old school progressive rock sound. The song hits a wall and drops into a loose interlude, then falls into a Robyn Hitchcock tinged psychedelic folk. Juggernaut vs. Monolith, mentioned above, covers the lo-fi, punky garage rock angle for the the album. Then Tourist UFO hits the classic Guided By Voices sound.

Let It Beard delivers on these samples with many great songs and a remarkably cohesive sound. Much of the credit for the flow of the album lies with band member Chris Slusarenko, who started the project with 40 of Pollards acoustic demos. He and Pollard settled on the songs to keep and Slusarenko worked them out and effectively managed production for the album. Drummer John Moen rounds out the group and many guests, like Colin Newman, J Mascis, and Mitch Mitchell, added their imprints to the album.

With so many gems, it's hard to pick a few to talk about, but three stood out for me. The title track is a little mini-epic. It starts out like a classic rocker, warm with distorted guitar and a simple vocal repetition that kicks into a a sound like Robyn Hitchcock playing Rolling Stones' covers. It slides into a Bowie style groove for a while. A guitar steps out to make its assertion, which drives the song into a throbbing Who style rocker, with shades of Long Live Rock and Baba O'Riley. It's a wonderful and unselfconscious journey.

I also loved the driving sound of You Just Can't Tell. The verse vocals are like Brian Eno's Third Uncle, with a steady, staccato run of syllables. The tension builds relentlessly as more details are layered into place. The uneasy ending leaves things at loose ends, but fits perfectly into the chiming pop sound of the following track, Chevy Marigold.

Rounding out my favorites is Tabby and Lucy, which wraps up a Mott the Hoople verse with a classic GBV chorus. The result is some of the finest outsider pop ever made. Low level feedback, shimmery tones, and other sonic textures turn the simple pop structure into something more meaningful. In an ideal world, all pop would be this engaging. "Something to know, something to say, something to take my blues away."

The sprawling extent calls for something unusual, but session strength. I once brewed a refreshing ginger cherry beer that would be perfect to accompany Let It Beard.

Check out Pollard's teaser trailer for the album on YouTube.