1988
Robyn Hitchcock
Globe Of Frogs (A&M AMA 5182) ****
by Ralph Traitor
With his signing to A&M Records -- whose American wing, in particular, is busy making plans for him -- Britain's foremost garden suburban fantasist might be on the verge of a brave new adventure. None of which has affected his music a jot.
Hitchcock is a master of phantasmagoric lyrics, seemingly wrenched from the notebooks of gnomes experimenting with powerful hallucinogenics. He rhapsodises the most outlandish things, utilising a country stream-of-consciousness that is wrapped securely in gaseous, feathery melodies worthy of the best '60s Psychedelia.
Surprising changes and rearrangements keep your expectations at bay, the tunes walking up the down escalator persistently. Is it frivolous, mere frippery? Is it genius, Pop that fell to earth from some benevolent parallel race of aliens? Is it danceable? That depends on how you dance....
Globe Of Frogs is not a quantum leap in Hitchcock's creative crazy paving career, but when you're unique, what's there to prove? The Americans may perceive Hitchcock as some J.R.R.-Tolkien-meets-Hawkwind; if so, and it proves profitable, more power to this blissful bard.
"Vibrating", "Balloon Man", "Chinese Bones" with the very Hitchcock line "Something Shakespeare never said is, 'You got to be kidding'" these absurdist, capricious annexes to an already overripened imagination are the stuff legends are made of.
May America cower before Robyn Hitchcock's muse and come to know the meaning of this: "Floating in a most exotic pool/Feeling so goodnatured I could drool".
COPYRIGHT NOTICE