1991
Sixties Apocalyptic Meaninglessness
Robyn Hitchcock Nails Whatever It Is Down
Robyn Hitchcock And The Egyptians
Perspex Island (A&M)
by Robert Fiore
Nothing could be easier than to underestimate the importance of The Egyptians to Robyn Hitchcock, but they are a big reason why he makes better albums than a lot of better songwriters. The necessity of accommodating other personalities in a regular band helps make the hermit less hermetic and shifts the emphasis from writing songs to making records. You don't get the same kind of input from a studio band, even if it's the same musicians every time.
Even an album with no real standout tracks like Perspex Island has a sense of direction you don't find in, say, a John Hiatt album. On his own, Hitchcock is the last standard-bearer of what Warren Zevon once called the Sixties Apocalyptic Meaninglessness genre of songwriting. Back in the days of songwriting teams, a lyricist would sometimes write a dummy lyric, a set of key lines, and random rhyming phrases in the approximate structure of the song so the composer could work on it before the final lyrics were finished. That's what Hitchcock's songs sound like a lot of the time. But his saving grace is a knack for making the good lines jump out at you while empty ones fade back. Exhortations rise out of a maelstrom of twang: you have to "nail it down", and you've "gotta be straight about it", we're going to "rock on to the oceanside" (to what purpose is never quite clear, but it's kind of inspiring nevertheless). It should be said that a line like "Birds in Perspex come alive" is sung with equal conviction. Vocally, Hitchcock has inherited the classic English Pop squawk that runs from John Lennon to Roy Wood to Ian Hunter with god-knows-how-many stops around and between. Is there something about having this kind of voice that gives you a Dylan fixation? When he sings about "Ultra Unvelievable Love", he's right, you don't believe it -- but that's the price of being a wise guy. He does effectively deploy his one credible emotion -- regret -- in "She Doesn't Exist", the best song on the album. Perspex Island is more for the faithful than the undecided, but that's nothing new with this outfit.
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