Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
May 25, 1997
Absurdity And Not Much Else Makes Robyn Hitchcock A Tiring Act
by Kevin John Bozelka
Robyn Hitchcock is one in a long line of British eccentrics who have garnered a rabid cult following in The United States.
He first came to notoriety with such twisted love songs as "I Wanna Destroy You", recorded with The Soft Boys, which was also the starting point for Kimberley Rew.
Rew went on to more mainstream success with Katrina And The Waves. But Hitchcock, by contrast, became a college radio darling in the mid-'80s with his album Fegmania! and the song "My Wife and My Dead Wife" a satirical number about a man who keeps his former wife's corpse around for tea and conversation.
Alfred wasn't the only Hitchcock who could bring perverse horror to an audience.
The problem with Robyn Hitchcock, however, is that there is no give in his music.
That was made agonizingly clear at his show Friday night at Shank Hall.
As a wise bard of the postmodern era, Hitchcock loads his songs with surreal imagery and absurdities at the expense of melody, feeling and, most definitely, rhythm. Thus the artist and his bitterly uncritical audience wind up validating weirdness for weirdness' sake, which quickly gets dull.
Alone with an acoustic guitar, Hitchcock carried the show effectively on this premise for about 45 minutes. He started with a song that picked on Gene Hackman's blandness and seasoned the time between songs with nonsense about cooking marshmallows in a TV set.
But as soon as he strapped on an electric guitar, he gave in to his discursive side, rambling on and on in a dreamy state and making pathetic attempts at guitar solos (a Robyn Hitchcock guitar solo is one of the most useless phenomena in the musical universe).
So where at the beginning he actually made you think about how nondescript Gene Hackman is, by the end you were rolling your eyes at his endless non-sequiturs.
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