Daily Trojan
April 2, 2001
The Soft Boys Album Re-Release Is Long Overdue
by Joe Tepperman
For a while, they were the most sickly versatile band on earth. Dazzling and degrading, overly technical but with a fetish for human error, The Soft Boys had all the right emotions and musical ideology covered. In their mere five years of existence, young Robyn Hitchcock's pre-Egyptians group specialized in harsh Beefheartian raunch, Jangle-y Byrd-blues and a uniquely British brand of festering Folk before finally settling on the dazzling Psychedelic Pop Punk material that became their undeniably perfect, widely influential, and largely unheard 1980 album Underwater Moonlight. Reissued last month on Matador Records along with a slew of outtakes and coinciding with the band's reunion tour this Spring, this deluxe two-disc set is a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the Soft Boys' peak.
The glorious incoherence and psychosis that characterized their first two full-length efforts was notably absent. Underwater Moonlight landed far closer to The Soft Boys' Syd-Barrett-meets-Sid-Vicious target than either the disjointed A Can Of Bees or the aborted Invisible Hits. Hitchcock had begun to settle into the thoughtful oddball songwriter persona he's best known for today, penning tumultuous but coherent material more or less effortlessly.
On the surface, songs such as "Insanely Jealous" and "Kingdom Of Love" are basically textbook paranoid delusions in song format, but there's a telling vulnerability to Hitchcock's ramblings, a beautiful artistic mania he wouldn't perfect until well into his solo career, but is first hinted at here.
The bonus disc of taped rehearsals for the Underwater Moonlight sessions, unique to this release, betrays a certain eerie telepathy within the band as a whole. Vocal harmonies and inspired impromptu arrangements suddenly materialize and come obviously off-the-cuff from the mentally unified Kimberley Rew, Matthew Seligman, and Morris Windsor, while Hitchcock preaches an improvised gospel, Walk down the street/Shufflin' his meat, clever and unappetizing as always. The volume of never-before-released songs is a testament to Hitchcock's prodigious output at the time. Hearing eventual album cuts like "Old Pervert" or "Underwater Moonlight" in their larval state is almost painful in light of the great vanished titles, for instance "Like A Real Smoothie" and "She Wears My Hair", fully-formed songs that only now have made it outside of the Cambridge Rowing Club Boathouse where they were rehearsed, shoddily recorded and promptly shelved.
The Soft Boys were a band out of time, too late for its influences and not sufficiently fashionable for its own. Underwater Moonlight's comprehensive reissue, musical eons after the band's 1981 breakup, is not only exciting, it's poetic justice. The Soft Boys pushed their songs and themselves to deliver an album so textually and emotionally sound that it practically invented all of Postpunk, Neo-Psychedelia, and indie rock to come. With no record contract, utter fan and critical indifference, and laughably arcane recording equipment, Robyn Hitchcock and his Boys proved they weren't so soft as to give up without making one great record.
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