N.M.E.
August 30, 1980
The Soft Option
Soft Boys
Underwater Moonlight
by Andrew Tyler
Sexy Malcolm McLaren wouldn't care for these A-level chaps. Malc likes them 14, C-60 stupid and all done up in depression gold (for which he earnestly hopes, one day, to own the franchise). Soft Boys, thank god, have a mind of their own. It belongs to plucky Robyn Hitchcock who plays guitar, bass, writes most of the material and whose singing is so appallingly rank it amounts to an act of faith.
The same might be said for the lyrics. These too are scooped from deep down within. From the very crevices of his fibre. It is for this reason, for the all-'round striaght-backed delivery that I grow fonder and fonder of this shoddy package.
If it's to be tagged, I would tag it late-'60s West Coast. Just prior to themes and concepts when three minutes of magnificently contrived Pop music was beginning to be considered counterrevolutionary trite. Idiotic, yes. But I've got a feeling Soft Boys are already free-falling into the same intellectual snakepit.
They show a keenness to Chinese-wrestle themes that warrant no more than a nod. "Insanely Jealous" for instance is portentious waft that would have washed far better sans the thinking caps (do I hear a drum solo in the offing?). And "You'll Have To Go Sideways" is nothing so much as a stoned riff that would best have been dumped next morning with the cigarette butts and beer cans.
But, strangely, it is these same traits that pull me towards the work. The earnestness, the open, unrepentant buffoonery. Ah yes, warm yer feet.
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