VOX
1996
Moss Elixir
by Arif Ansari
Having shed his backing Egyptians and found a new home with Warner Brothers, Robyn Hitchcock has made what is perhaps one of the finest albums of his career. Despite making a fresh start, Moss Elixir is mostly brilliant because it encapsulates all of the things which Hitchcock has done well over his long career. It's like a "best of" package where all the songs are new.
But this isn't to say that all of the songs are rip-offs of his past work. While there are definite parallels to be drawn between Moss Elixir and Hitchcock's back-catalogue, when you've made as many albums as he has, a bit of repetition can be hard to avoid. The Byrdsesque Pop that dominated albums like Queen Elvis and Perspex Island comes to the fore on "Alright, Yeah" and "Beautiful Queen" (on which Robyn is superbly backed by Homer -- the band, not the poet nor the Simpson), while the discordant saxophones of "DeChirico Street" recall past days with The Soft Boys. The highlights of the album are the tracks where Hitchcock opts for a sparser sound -- a la his brilliant solo Eye -- bringing his songwriting skills to the fore. "Heliotrope", one of the three songs on here which features Robyn unaided, is the most immediately grabbing of his new songs. Shimmering and delicate, it's one of his best "love" songs yet.
Moss Elixir also sees Hitchcock mixing in some new elements -- like the brilliant violin and viola work of Deni Bonet -- so we know that one of Pop's most notorious eccentrics isn't living in the past. And all of his quirkiness seems in check, keeping obscure references to a minimum. (But turning out a pile of lyrical gems: "Darling/You don't have to call me Stalin/Or even Mao Tse-tung/'cause I'm much too young", he sings on "The Devil's Radio". When he tells us that he was "followed home by a weighing machine on DeChirico Street", we know it's all in good fun.)
Robyn has included another completely mental story in his liner notes, one which is about death and rebirth. It's more than slightly fitting: with Moss Elixir this songwriter stands to make the great leap from being his generation's Syd Barrett to its Dylan.
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