Like Robyn Hitchcock but more Francophile and less strange

I've been really enjoying the upcoming Trip to the Coast by British songwriter Bill Pritchard. Pritchard has been around for a while, and he's got a very nicely weathered, rueful tone, songs well put together but unfussy, catchy in a very casual way. It's the kind of album that sneaks up on you.

Pritchard also sounds a good bit like Robyn Hitchcock, the same growly bottom, the same pitch and timbre in the mid-range...I don't think they really have much else in common, except maybe a pallette of late-1960s influences, but their voices are similar.

Anyway, check it out if you like


The record will be out on Tapete Records early in March.

Time is round and space is curved

You could do a lot worse than spending a week with Robyn Hitchcock's new best-of collection, Chronology...which is what I've been doing. My review runs at Blurt this morning, but there's actually not much to say about this, except it's a good listen, a reasonable entry point and an excellent, manageably-sized reminder.

I wrote, "There are no real surprises here, nothing new for the devoted fan to chew on. Still pretty much every track is a winner, from the opening salvos of punkish "I Want to Destroy You" through the spare melancholy of acoustic "Queen Elvis" through the shadowy, charcoal smudged mysteries of "Goodnight Oslo." Look at Chronolology as the world's oddest Whitman's box sampler. Choose any one of these truffles of eccentricity and bite down. You can hardly go wrong."

The rest

Have you heard the new Robyn Hitchcock?

It’s called Goodnight Oslo. I’ve been listening to it a little bit over the weekend. I’m by no means a strict proponent of skill and craft in popular music, this one is so beautifully, intelligently made that it makes you wonder about all that substandard dreck floating around in the blogosphere.

You know about Hitchcock from the Soft Boys, but you might not know that his band, the Venus 3, is made up of Scott MacCaughey, Peter Buck and Bill Rieflen…all serious musical threats on their own terms (except, perhaps, for MacCaughey, who is very good, but hardly ever serious about anything).

Here’s a video of the title track, performed at the Austin City Limits Festival this fall.


Oh, I never closed the loop on Jay Reatard, but he was very, very good – in fact, I can’t remember the last time I saw someone who was so completely out there. He’s also, in some way, really reserved, I don’t think you could see more than a fifth of his face the whole show because of the hair in it, and he doesn’t banter at all. But the songs were totally intense, one after another, no breaks (like the Ramones), starting with material from Blood Visions and proceeding more or less chronologically through the In the Red singles, the Matador singles and finally this year’s Watch Me Fall. He had three different guitars, which seemed to be matched to three different sets of songs, a flying wedge electric for the Blood Visions stuff, a plugged in acoustic for the Matador singles and another electric for the end. The crowd was really, really young because Who Shot Hollywood had opened (average age maybe 17?) and brought all their friends, so it was very high energy down near the stage and absolutely exhilarating. If you get a chance, go see him. This was one of the best concerts I’ve been to all year.