L.A. Weekly
March 9, 2001
The Soft Boys
Underwater Moonlight (Matador)
by Dan Epstein
It's often been said that great records find you, and not the other way around. Half my life ago, inspired by a rave review in the original Trouser Press Guide To New Wave Records, I spent hours digging vainly through import and used bins for The Soft Boys' Underwater Moonlight LP. Originally released in 1980, the record eluded me until my freshman year of college, when a still-sealed copy suddenly turned up in my local vinyl emporium. Its timing was perfect -- six months previous, the magic of an album brimming with sex, psychedelia, and Fender Telecasters would have been completely lost on an overly serious high school student who hadn't had much experience with any of the above. But for the next four years, Underwater Moonlight became my ever-present companion, serving as an acerbic Greek chorus to my grapplings with girls, drugs, and various other distractions from my academic career.
Truth be told, I haven't listened to Underwater Moonlight much in the past decade. I spun it so often that I can still download every lick, lyric, and muttered aside at will from the Napster of my mind. That said, Matador's new edition of the album sounds even better than I remembered. Robyn Hitchcock would go on to make several excellent solo albums after Underwater Moonlight, but none of them ever crackled with this sort of visceral electricity. Hitchcock and Kimberley Rew's Yardbirdsian guitar duels on "Kingdom Of Love", "Insanely Jealous", and the title track are still dizzying in their beauty, while the soaring kill-for-peace anthems "I Wanna Destroy You" and "Positive Vibrations" -- not to mention the Beefheart Blues of "Old Pervert" -- exude a musical confidence completely at odds with the prevailing sounds of the day. And if someone has since come up with a better fusion of The Beatles, Byrds, and Hollies than "Queen Of Eyes", I haven't heard it.
One complaint: as with previous CD versions, Matador's reissue attaches several outtakes to the end of the record. While interesting, their presence winds up detracting from the full-blown excellence of the album's original contents. They should have been relegated to the bonus disc, which features some previously unreleased rehearsal recordings. But just buy the CD, take the time to program tracks 1 through 10 into your player, and let 'em rip: 36 minutes of twisted Pop perfection will be your reward.
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