Wall Of Sound
1998
Robyn Hitchcock
Storefront Hitchcock
Label: Warner Bros.
Genre: None
File Under: Just As Mad As Ever
Rating: 82
by Spence Abbott
More than 14 years after he redefined the parameters of the concert film with the Talking Heads' Stop Making Sense, Jonathan Demme returns to the genre with witty, off-kilter popster Robyn Hitchcock as his subject. Like the film -— which merely puts the camera on Hitchcock and lets him do his thing -— the album presents the twisted bard in stripped down mode; just his tinny vocal timbre and acoustic guitar performing a nice selection from his extensive sonic canon. As Hitchcock points out in the liner notes, a concert movie and a soundtrack record are radically different things, and as such the spoken word intros between songs have been trimmed. As well, some songs have been omitted ("Airscape" is in the film, but not on the album) and others added ("Beautiful Queen" made the album cut, but isn't represented in the film). That said, this album presents a nice collection of tunes from a bona fide master of quirky pop theology.
The brisk acoustic strumming of "1974" starts the set off, as Hitchcock delivers a twisted remembrance of two decades past. "Let's Go Thundering" is a mid-tempo Shuffle featuring guest violinist Deni Bonet, who adds a Celtic lilt to the tune. "I'm Only You" features rippling guitar textures which gently cascade over Hitchcock's Jaggeresque falsetto. This bleeds into the intricate six-string workout of "Glass Hotel", in which Hitchcock exhibits his delicate sense of melody. Hitchcock's twisted lyrical outlook is best exemplified by the manic "The Yip Song", which not only features high-pitched yipping, but a song structure vaguely similar to the nursery rhyme "Knick-Knack Paddywack". While the bulk of the album is strictly acoustic, Hitchcock does plug in -— to excellent effect -— on the hypnotically chugging "Freeze". He also delivers a plaintively haunting version of Hendrix's "The Wind Cries Mary".
The focus here is primarily on the man and his music, but the sparse accompaniment from Bonet on violin and additional guitar from Tim Keegan creates an added dimension on several tracks, including the swirling intoxication of the album's closing song, "Beautiful Queen".
The weird, often non-sequitur nature of the spoken intros may be lost on all but the most die-hard of Hitchcock fans, though it still gives a slanted glimpse into the mind's eye of one of the great, unsung songsmiths of the past two decades. Perhaps taking Hitchcock's reputation for between-song eccentricity into account, all the spoken word bits are cued up on the disc as separate tracks, so CD players can easily skip over them, leaving a strong, engaging 12-song album of acoustic bliss.
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