The Big Green House

Wednesday, November 13, 2002

 

Too old to rock & roll? Not too old to kick your punk ass!

The Soft Boys have released a new album, Nextdoorland.

To many of you, that information means precisely bupkis. To a lot of music junkies, it ranks a few rungs below news of a Second Coming (or First, depending on your viewpoint). Me, I was drooling like a baby when I first heard about it. Robyn Hitchcock was one of the artists that got me through the mid-to-late eighties. (I first heard of him, and The Soft Boys, through reading interviews with REM.) There were several occasions where I got off of work at 5:30, drove two hours down to Berkeley in order to see him play, then turned around and drove back home after the show so I could go to work the next day. There aren�t a lot of people I could say that about.

I am 41 years old, soon to be 42. I�m aware enough to notice that the fact of a new release, after twenty-some years, by a relatively obscure yet influential band does not elicit the same amount of excitement in my (gods forgive me for using this term) cohort that it does in myself... and so what? Most of them gave up their interest in such things, if it ever existed at all, in their late teens, maybe their late twenties. That�s about the time most so-called adults give up obsessing over trivial things like music and art & begin obsessing over trivial things like mortgages and scotch. I never really made the leap from music to �maturity�.

I was somewhat apologetic about that fact when I started writing this, but you know what? There are worse ways to illuminate one�s life. I�d much rather have good music lighting my way than something as banal as, say, golf. But that�s just me, I guess.

About the album: I�ve started this piece four or five times now, I think. I�ve actually lost count. Originally I didn�t think much of the album, but the more I play it the more I like it. Superficially, Nextdoorland sounds like a Hitchcock solo outing; not terribly surprising, given that he wrote and sang all the songs. They don�t stray very far from what you�d expect: surreal/absurd lyrics & jangly guitars.

It�s those guitars, courtesy of Mr. Hitchcock and Kimberley Rew, that got me to stay with it, twisting & swirling like spawning salmon on �Mr. Kennedy�, darkly mysterious on the instrumental �I Love Lucy�, rocking full out on �Unprotected Love�. (Rocking full out for The Soft Boys, that is; Motorhead is in no immediate danger.) It wasn�t until I taped the album so I could listen to it on the way into work that I fully appreciated how different the sonic landscape was from your garden-variety Hitchcock, though. Through my headphones I could pick out how delicately intertwined the various guitar lines are throughout the album, not just on those particular tunes. I�ve heard a lot of comparisons to the twin guitar interplay of Television; while I can see why that might come to mind, Hitchcock/Rew aren�t quite as aggressive as Verlaine/Lloyd, to my way of thinking anyway. If you�re looking for the angularity of Underwater Moonlight, you�re not going to find it here. It�s a little more sneaky than that.

I suppose one would say that the bass (Matthew Seligman) and drums (Morris Windsor) are �unobtrusive�, except that that�s kind of a backhanded compliment. You don�t have to be flashy to be good, and both of them do manage to get in a few nifty moves here & there over the course of the album.

If you�ve already made up your mind about Robyn Hitchcock &/or The Soft Boys, this probably isn�t going to budge you one way or the other. If, however, you�ve been sitting on the fence, trying to decide if you want to get involved in all that folky-psychy rock & roll stuff you�ve been hearing about, this would be as good a place to start as any.

bmarkey 11/13/2002 04:39:00 PM