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Monday, April 9th, 2007

🦋 Perspex Island song by song: Oceanside

Listen to the beginning -- the choral voices come in slow, gaining force, then bang! comes the beat, and Hitchcock singing to you about seaweed and descent. This song gets you moving and movement is going to be a constant force on this record. Maybe I will find today, maybe I will lose tomorrow, he tells you, and you're in his moment, rolling across the golden sand and out into the waves. Floating and sinking are all you can do. ("The big red sun that won't go down") Listen to what Hitchcock does with his voice, the way he sings the chorus. Listen to the way the background vocals introduce him. This is what I want rock and roll to be.

posted evening of April 9th, 2007: Respond
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🦋 Perspex Island

I've been listening to this record constantly since I got it last week and I think it is maybe the best rock and roll album I have ever heard. The songs individually are masterpieces, and the connecting thread running between the songs and through the album -- well it's enough to take my breath away.

So that said -- I have gotten into my head that I want to write about the record, as a first step toward writing about Robyn Hitchcock's music. I want to write about it song by song, communicate some of the ideas it puts in my head. That is a project I am going to be taking on over the next couple of weeks -- this link will take you to the thread of posts about the record. A little background:

Recently when I was getting interested in Robyn and looking around You-Tube to see if I could find any of his performances, I clicked on an MTV acoustic performance of "Birds in Perspex" and I thought That is about the most beautiful thing I have ever heard out of Robyn's mouth. Turns out the rest of the record is equally miraculous. Here is some of what I find by searching Google for information on the record.

• It's Hitchcock's 16th recording, his "least abstract and most revealing to date". Hitchcock thinks "If one of these songs cracked it would stay broken."
• Pete Dooley hates it as "an American album by a British band".
• Mark Fleischmann thinks it is Hitchcock's best album since "Black Snake Diamond Role". Robyn tells him that he wrote the album around the time he was getting together with his wife Cynthia Hunt.
• 3 songs from Perspex Island made the charts, according to Chris Kocher.
• Paul Shrug says that Hitchcock "released Perspex Island exactly at the moment I needed it". I didn't listen to the record then (1991) but I am finding that the record is exactly what I need at this moment.
• Ira Robbins (and/or his co-author Michael Pietsch) doesn't think Perspex Island sounds much like Hitchcock (a sentiment I am finding bizarre) but still calls it "poignantly top-notch".

posted evening of April 9th, 2007: Respond