Robert
Wyatt
Comicopera
(Domino Recording Co)
"It's really about the unpredictable
mischief of real life - it's sort of chaotic our life. It's
about humans and the things we turn to, and looking for fun
and stimulus and meaning and stuff." Robert Wyatt
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Robert Wyatt is one of my favourite singers, writers, makers
of wonderful music. It is with pleasure that I can introduce
you to this, his latest album, and first for Domino.
I first discovered Robert Wyatt's music when borrowing, and
then stealing, Ruth Is Stranger Than Richard from
a library. Then came a second-hand purchase of the 'Shipbuilding'
7", which I played repeatedly, not even thinking to flip
it over. A few years later, it was my near-20 years late discovery
of the Mid Eighties compilation and Old Rottenhat
that really fixed my glue to Wyatt's music. I was obsessed
(and not least by that very b side to 'Shipbuilding' - 'Memories
of You'). It seemed in Robert's 'home' recordings, these unfinished-sounding,
and barely accompanied, odds and ends - covers, originals,
spoken pieces - with just wonderful synthesizers, percussion
and piano to support the familiarly fragile voice, I had found
home. I've been delving further and repeatedly into his deep
well for a few years now, and it is no surprise to even find
his songs cropping up in many of my DJ sets, as well as my
home listening. With Dondestan, Shleep, Cuckooland
and now Comicopera, Wyatt seems to have found his
own 'home' music - each record intimate and sophisticated,
played with (the suggestion of) ease and curiosity. And also
fun.
Comicopera, divided into three Acts - 'Lost in Noise',
'The Here and The Now', and 'Away with the Fairies', continues
where these albums had left off, but it is initially less
dense than Cuckooland, and more light and live sounding.
Robert says he was keen to have the sound of a group of musicians
playing in the room together, but more importantly, to have
friends (furthermore than musicians who play these particular
instruments), playing together:
"Music isn't just an abstract pleasure, it is company,
when you play a record. Why I like Duke Ellington and Charles
Mingus, the Big Bands - is because every character in the
band is identifiable as that person - there's this group of
humans in a room." (Wyatt)
That gives this record its sense of spontaneity, despite its
deliberate pacing and construction as something of a three
Act 'Opera':
"Musically, the changes are quite abrupt. And the narrator
actually shifts. At the end of the second section I'm both
the euphoric bomber ('A Beautiful War'), and the apoplectic
bombed person ('Out of the Blue'). It shifts about in a way
that I haven't consciously done in the past."
In Act One, the album opens with a plea for patience - Anja
Garbarek's 'Stay Tuned', and as stated, a fair amount of light
has crept in (from which end of the tunnel is it not clear...).
We are treated to love songs (of sorts), before Act Two threatens
to brighten further, with a community and carnival-esque feel
pervading the mood; before at the close of the Act, the bombing
takes place. Act Three, 'Away with the Fairies', the darkest,
and most noisy, recalls some of the unsettling mood of his
80s productions, where odd synths underpin the voice and minor
chords are wedged next to each other in close chromatic proximity.
Act Three also marks the shift from songs in English language
to Italian and Spanish - a pivotal moment in the record from
which point onwards Robert claims he refused to sing in English,
as a protest -
"After the bombing - it's to do with feeling completely
alienated from Anglo-American culture at that point. Just
sort of being silent as an English-speaking person, because
of this fucking war. The last thing I sing in English is "you've
planted all your everlasting hatred in my heart". I then
wander off round the world searching for different kinds of
meaning - whether its avant guard, or revolution, or serialist
fantasy, or religion, or all those things. Pretentious or
what?! Well I don't care anymore."
Before you reach that final segment (the inverse of the traditional
Comic Opera light and uplifting ending), this feels like it
could even be Robert Wyatt's 'pop' album. He's openly a fan
of 'tunes', and the deep influence of songs such as 'Raining
in My Heart', covered on his last record, has perhaps had
an impact on the melodies and compressed structures of these
new performances. But the depth of the journey here, from
start to finish, is magnificent, and stopping off along the
way for the sublime steel pan and sax battle of 'On the Town
Square'; or for the frantic song of bomber versus bombed,
featuring Brian Eno's sampled voice replayed by Wyatt on synthesizer,
'Out of the Blue', seems only to be expected in an album as
enjoyable and ambitious as this.
-------------------------------------------
"Greeks divided things into Comedy and Tragedy, and Comedy
didn't mean funny, it meant just, 'about human foibles', as
opposed to tragedy which is about Gods and Destiny. So this
is about human foibles. I want to emphasise that because I
do end up singing a kind of hymn to Che Guevarra, but I'm
talking about human foibles, I'm not looking for new Gods."
There are some of Wyatt's best songs here, seemingly tossed
off with ease. There are love songs of sorts, but love songs
of tolerance as much as simple delight. 'Just As You Are',
for example, is further from the sentimentality of the Billy
Joel/Barry White classic, than should be possible with such
familiar linguistic terrain. It is about living with someone
else. The emphasis here is on realism; on the gaps and distance
as much as the closeness, between lovers. The song crops up
later in 'Fragment', in what sounds like reversed, compressed
form, an anarchic and crude remix - either undermining the
beauty of its original version, or emphasising, via cut up
repetition, the implicit contentedness versus resignation
of the lines "I'm never going to change a thing about
you". Songs like 'Just As You Are' and 'A Beautiful War',
are, melodically so sweet, but they veer away from any safe
'pop' territory in the tension between mellifluous beauty
and lyrical harshness. For others the juxtaposition is the
other way around, but it is this tension, which is central
to Comicopera's mastery.
"When I'm writing I write completely on automatic - actually
a better word is composing, meaning putting together, because
I didn't write the first song or the last one - so when I'm
putting together a record I do it completely instinctively,
like an animal hunting for food or whatever. And only once
I've done it do i work out what I was up to. I don't think
beforehand, I think afterwards. I find that plans ahead, concepts
ahead limit you."
Whether or not the concepts that help elevate this record
above a mere loose collection of songs came before or after,
it is clear that the editing process, the composition here,
and the songwriting itself, is quite astounding. There is
so much to find, and to return to, in the generous 'company'
of this record.
Alexis Taylor
Hot Chip
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