The Confuser, by Robyn Hitchcock
Robyn Hitchcock isn’t the most prolific songwriter, but his later solo albums impart the sense that the songs the British musician does write, and does consider good enough to be recorded, tumble from his mind like coins from a jackpotted slot machine.
Hitchcock’s 25th tumble, The Confuser, follows a 2023 collection of instrumentals and 2024 memoir-related dive into covers of classic 1967 songs, and it continues the good-naturedly casual professionalism of 2022’s Shufflemania!
The professionalism comes from skilled hands in Nashville, his longtime home: producer Brad Jones, guitarist Jeremy Fetzer, bassist Todd Bolden, and drummer Eric Slick can include Taylor Swift, Jill Sobule, and Lambchop on their CVs, and they easily handle the knowingly literate pub rock of “Yesterday’s Rain” or the genteel psychedelia of “Breathless.”
The casualness emanates from Hitchcock, who sings faster songs as if surfing the beat and slower songs as if stretching catlike over his phrases. Because those phrases have tended to be thoughtful and clever since 1979, he has perhaps earned the surfing and stretching.
He has also perhaps earned the right to be insolently philosophical: “I Am This Thing” combines Descartes and Eric Idle within a classic-rock framework; “Building From the Ruins” perseveres through local and universal destruction via a light Stones shuffle; and “Wasted” outlines interpersonal purposelessness during a C&W trot.
As usual, Hitchcock tosses in something he probably scrawled for a lark. Here, that would be “My Dead Astronaut,” a pleasurable space-filler (in more than one way). Also as usual, he slips in an unexpectedly heartbreaking ballad. That would be “Ghost in Sunlight,” strengthened by his Soft Boys bandmate Kimberley Rew’s Abbey Road guitar and prettified by Gillian Welch’s powdered-sugar backing vocal.
Robyn Hitchcock presents The Confuser as a confection, crafted with care but without overt intent to provide hearty sustenance. He isn’t the most prolific songwriter, and he doesn’t have to be the most profound.
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