The Boston Globe
May 20, 1993
Hitchcock & The Egyptians Ride The Middle Lane
Robyn Hitchcock And The Egytpians At Nighstage With Murray Attaway, Tuesday Night
by Jim Sullivan
Robyn Hitchcock And The Egyptians have never sounded more like John Lennon And The Beatles -- and that's not meant to shower them with grandiose praise. It's simply meant to acknowledge that their harmony vocals have never been more pristine, and suggest that Hitchcock And The Egyptians are sounding less these days like the band's prototype: Syd Barrett And Pink Floyd. Put another way: The Egyptians' Rock -- still quirky, still dreamy, still compelling -- rolls more down the middle of Pop Lane. The rangy Hitchcock is less of an eccentric oddball, less a champion of frogs and fish and balloon men and things, and more a serious artist musing upon subjects like love and death.
Yet, everything is relative. A more straightforward Hitchcock still welcomed the sold-out Nightstage crowd to Berklee Performance Center -- you see, the show was shifted to the smaller venue because of slow ticket sales -- and was soon musing about oxygen, sound molecules, and sleep habits. After one song, Hitch and his mates -- drummer Morris Windsor, keyboardist-bassist Andy Metcalfe -- had broken from the setlist to play Cream's "Sunshine of Your Love". Then, the quick-witted Hitch was off on a good-natured kvetching about classic Rock. "It's a virus. Some of you can't even have been conceived when it came out, and there you are grooving away like we're Glenn Miller (or something)." Later he introduced "Queen Elvis" as being entitled "It's Hard To Come Out When You Think You're Straight". He renamed "The Yip Song" "The Signaling Toward You With Dying Puppies". See, try as he might to sand off the psychedelic-cosmic edges, you can't quite take the space cadet out of the born-again popster. And that's fine.
Hitchcock And The Egyptians played a generous 100-minute set, with the accent on songs from the latest album, Respect. They got a lot of different sounds out of the permutations of instruments: acoustic and electric guitars, 12-string guitars, synthesizer, piano, bass pedals, acoustic and electric bass, electronic drums, and standard drums. It certainly wasn't like one of those oh-so-trendy (but limp) unplugged gigs. But neither was it full-tilt Rock 'n' Roll. Call it intimate -- with Metcalfe's deep, sonorous basslines playing off Hitchcock's intricate, tendril-like leads and Windsor's supple percussion. There were a number of sparkling melodies -- "Arms of Love", "Queen Elvis", "Airscape", and "Railway Shoes" in particular -- and considerable attention to detail. Add in the harmonies, and this is where you think of The Beatles around their "Strawberry Fields Forever" period.
Hitch and his mates wove a dreamscape and let you glide into their colorful haze. Occasionally, snatches of sharp lyrics or metaphors popped out -- "It's hard to recover when you're the disease" in "Railway Shoes" or "When I was dead I wasn't interested in sex/I didn't care what happened next/I was free as a penny whistle, and silent as the glove/I wasn't me to speak of, just a thousand ancient feelings/That vanished into nothing -- into love". "Arms of Love" -- which I once heard as rather cloying -- had a soft, seductive charm about it. The only downside was that Hitchcock omitted two classics, "Goodnight I Say" and "My Wife And My Dead Wife" and that the show peaked at the end of the regular set. His two-song solo-acoustic encore segment didn't captivate and his "Wafflehead" -- his aerobics workout/Disco stomp -- didn't transcend its goofiness. Still, fine stuff. Mellower, more aged, still potent.
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