The Confuser by Robyn Hitchcock–Album Review
The Confuser by Robyn Hitchcock–Album Review
All along the banks of the River Charles, bronze statues of historical and sports personae got behatted with traffic cones during the month of June! George Washington. Bill Russell. Bobby Orr (who incidentally asked my mom out twice, but never secured a hat trick with her- she was dating my dad!) Even Jack, Kack, Lack, Mack, Nack, Wack, Pack, and Quack from Robert McClosky’s Make Way for Ducklings in Boston Garden got coned! What gave? Who was behind all of this? The Scotland National Football Team had become the sweethearts of Boston, which hosted seven matches for the 2026 FIFA World Cup. You’d see Scotland fans all over town wearing kilts. You’d hear them chanting “NO SCOTLAND, NO PARTY!” to “Seven Nation Army” at outdoor watch parties. They even discovered the infamous “Cop Slide” at Government Center; one fan even played the bagpipes while sliding down the 18-foot-long metal chute! So why the traffic cones? This tradition began in Glasgow in the 80s, when, late one night, drunken revelers placed a traffic cone atop The Duke of Wellington’s head. Authorities removed it but, in an act of defiance and Scottish pride, the Duke got his orange cap back the following night. This kind of merrymaking has continued since, and fans brought to Boston for the big occasion. Sadly, Scotland lost to Morocco on June 19th, so fans relocated to Miami, where their team would play more matches, and woolly kilts kept fans piping hot!
But Groovers, who really comes to mind when you think of traffic cones? Robyn Hitchcock, of course! That kaleidoscopic, supersonic, everything is polka-dottic, RIGHT on BARD! He founded the Soft Boys, The Egyptians, and The Venus 3. He has had an extensive and illustrious career beginning years before Scots put orange cones on the heads of dukes! This summer, RH is putting two flavorful things out into the universe: his new book, Stranded in the Future, and his album The Confuser. Incidentally, this coincides with the 20th anniversary of the death of a certain interstellar Vegetable Man. There is a great deal of sophistication and self-reflection in both book and album, although you can tell that he still possesses the same boundless curiosity where rotary phones intrigue him, cheese varieties delight him, trams render him wistful, but he harbors feelings of limerence for electrically tethered trolley buses. After all, he’s the one who has made words like spanner, Anglepoise lamp, and prawns feel less lonely! I plunged into both book and album with extreme simultaneity. The book especially gave me a sense of anemoia and a longing to exist in Cambridge, England in the 1970’s where it felt like it was always dusk, and where I might have an encounter with “Mr. A/B”; This was a time where you could buy a Bob Dylan album only to come home to discover a manufacturing mishap; the disc in the sleeve might actually be Here Come The Warm Jets. This kind of thing just doesn’t happen anymore!
RELATED: 1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left book review
So now take your figurative thumbnail, find the figurative mouth in your brand-new album’s figurative sleeve, puncture the figurative cellophane, and slide it figuratively down to liberate your new disc of shiny black vinyl. With hopes that you have the correct album, here is, figuratively, Robyn Hitchcock’s The Confuser!
Just after the figurative needle finds its footing, “I Am this Thing” bursts forth as the starter with its funky denim, gargling wah-wah. The song’s intro has the same furrowed eyebrows as the one of early Egyptians’ “If you were a priest”. Hitchcock’s opens with this stanza:
I owe a lot to a dead man’s cock
Tick tock, tick tock
I love to rock
I am this thing
Aphrodite sprang from the severed testicles of the primordial sky god, Uranus. Similarly, Hitchcock sprang from the same package of his own dad. In the radio edit, they’ve simply added an ‘L ‘, and so it’s a clock he owes a lot to. That works too. It aligns with the tick-tocks in this verse! Later in the song, Hitchcock uses the same phrasing he used about his father to talk about deriving from his mum:
I grew out of somebody else
She wore a wedding ring
And when I decompose I will be
Part of everything
Hitchcock explains that this song is “a flash of existential bliss” and that “you’re only you once.” This song is a wonderful reflection on those moments when you would peer into the infinite depth of two facing mirrors in your grandmother’s bathroom. Here, you would ask “of all the people on earth and throughout civilization, how did I end up ME?” You arrive at the precipice of the coda when he repeats the lines “Touch me, I’m gone.” At this turn of events, it sounds like an old parishioner is pounding away at a carillon with rubber mallets somewhere in a far-off bell tower, and it echoes, like your fleeting soul, over the moors.
Emma Swift
“Yesterday’s Rain” is “classic Brit-rock, played as only Americans can,” proclaims Hitchcock. The guitar playing throughout is a wonderful throwback to Soft Boys times. In fact, you’re right if you thought those pulsing, tremolo-ed curly cues and sways that ebb and flow around the chorus sound like Kimberly Rew (playing like an American!). You can hear his buttery Telecaster wizardry on other tracks on The Confuser like “Breathless,” Building from the Ruins”, “How to Feel Alright,” and “Ghost in the Sunlight”. Of this song, RH explains, “The sins of the past call the shots for the future.” Your past decisions and maneuvers are the architects of today’s buzzkill. But that surely does not diminish the levity you see in the poolside music video accompanying this track. You’ll catch an appearance by Hitchcock’s wife Emma Swift as the tarot card reader!
“Ghost in the Sunlight” is as close as you can get to being transparent, invisible (and) see-through,” describes Hitchcock. With an intro that delightfully makes your front teeth vibrate, especially if you were shuffling a mouthful of Werther’s Originals, this track is a satisfyingly slow burn. In a very liminal pre-chorus, Pink Moon piano notes fall like autumn leaves, and they are accompanied by fruity mellotron flutes. Gillian Welch sings backing vocals, and they cling as closely to RH’s lead as if they are a slight shadow at the equator. Later in the song, they stretch away and become the sound of Welch’s very distinctive voice. The song ends with a finale in which Hitchcock and Welch bicker and banter unintelligibly. Could this be a slight nod to a very familiar chaotic radio static fade-out? That distorted Horner Pianet sound in the intro may have oriented you into an “I am the Walrus” frame of mind. If you read Stranded in The Future, you’re sure to have the echoes of the “yeahs” that are also in the coda of this song resonating through your head! It is haunting accompaniment as RH recounts his days of futures past.
There are so many other poignant, informed, haunting and exciting tracks on this album! In “Building from the Ruins”, RH proclaims that he misses “democracy like I miss my wisdom teeth”. I think we all kind of feel this way. “Monday for Me” begins with a dramatic intro that reminds me of the early James Gang, capable of sounding like smearing marmalade on giant toast. It waltzes on with hints of Mott The Hoople’s “Backsliding Fearlessly” from 1969. “How to Feel Alright” has that Bo Diddley rhythm behind it, and you’ll even catch Bow Wow Wow’s guitar barks in the bridge. You’ll hear once again the comedic guitar stylings of K-Rew. And the album, of course, closes with the honky-tonkish track “Wasted”, which was written with Dean Martin in mind to sing! This is a terrific comedown from peering into that infinite depth of RH’s cerebral cortex. “Wasted” is your well-earned tumbler of J&B Rare!
Robyn Hitchcock existed in the same realm as one Mr. Syd Barrett during the 1970s in Cambridge, England (not to be confused with the Cambridge near me known for its own little finishing school). He had heard of sightings, but he never ever locked eyes with the chap. In his book, he proclaims, “Life is about conserving my illusions.” He continues by saying, “T. S. Eliot suggested, at least to my mind, what might have been and what could not possibly have been both point to what never was.” RH was also in Boston in June. Perhaps he exchanged traffic cones with Scotland fans. But I like to imagine this scenario: a Scottish fan and RH are in each other’s vicinity. They are each brandishing a traffic cone (for different reasons, though- one as a symbol of pride, the other as a symbol of security in a chaotic world). In slow motion, they orbit each other in a crowd. But never the twain meet. I like to think that they each continued on their respective planes. A convergence might have left everyone confused, and a brawl could have broken out. Why shatter an illusion with confusion? But on this plane, you can surely have a new delicate membrane comprised of all the new tracks from Robyn Hitchcock’s The Confuser to encapsulate and protect all of your illusions! And do enjoy Stranded in the Future as well.
The Confuser arrives via Tiny Ghost Records on Friday, July 24th!
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Riffindots is Britta Pejic. Britta is a musician. Songwriter. Artist. Foreign Language Teacher. Grew up in Maine. Lived in France (The Basque Country). Now back in New England. Enjoys getting lost. Makes a lot of songs at home, puts them into a canister, then into a hatch, and then through her own pneumatic tube system under the Atlantic. The songs are vacuumed out the other end, dusted off and polished by Console Lole, her loyal sound engineer back in Basque Country. It’s a system that works well for her. Follow @riffindots for cartoonish fun and visual mayhem or simply enjoy her music at https://brittapejic.bandcamp.com.
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