17. Soft Boys, Underwater Moonlight (1980)

[2012 review here, 2012 review of “I Wanna Destroy You” here]

There’s so much sleaze on the second album by the Soft Boys (Robyn Hitchcock, Kimberley Rew, Mathew Seligman, and Morris Windsor) that I had to keep checking the genre designations to make sure I was where I belonged: “neo-psychedelia, post-punk, new wave, psychedelic pop, jangle pop, power pop” (Wikipedia). Underwater Moonlight is full of absolute banging rockers, kicking off with the guided missile of “I Wanna Destroy You.” That, more than its psychedelic strains, is more likely the main reason it’s one of those albums that didn’t sell well but started a million bands. The head trips lie more in the words—Hitchcock was a student of Syd Barrett and loved him almost as much as I love Hitchcock. The tracks here resemble love songs, but the twists have been torqued nearly to breaking point—“I wanna destroy you” is also the psychic mission statement for the album. It’s followed by “Kingdom of Love,” where “You've been laying eggs under my skin / Now they're hatching out under my chin / Now there's tiny insects showing through / And all them tiny insects look like you.” You don’t need a lyric sheet to catch the main themes. Hitchcock enunciates them well and they are pushed way up in the mix. An unsettling element of sexual and/or reproductive urge is often bubbling under these proceedings in uncomfortable ways. Did I say bubbling under? The longest song on the album is “I Got the Hots for You” and the one song with songwriting credit for the whole band is “Old Pervert.” The thing is, these elements—the excellent 2 guitars bass drums rock band and the weird sex notes in the words—are perfectly balanced, so much so that when the set erupts at the two-thirds point with an instrumental, “You’ll Have to Go Sideways,” it’s an orgasmic blast of thrilling energy that defines the whole project. Or at least gives us a moment off from love songs like “Insanely Jealous,” about a stalker. It reminds me of what the Pretenders did on their first album (also 1980), five songs in with “Space Invader.” Sometimes an instrumental says it all, and so it is here as far as the primo band goes. “Sideways” is followed by “Old Pervert,” about a guy who lives under a bridge and whispers to girls passing by. Wrenching, to say the least. Underwater Moonlight is an odd and perverse mix but somehow it works quite well at blowing the mind. Kimberley Rew would eventually move on to Katrina & the Waves, which doesn’t have much to do with psychedelics but a lot to do with adjacent pop (sunshine). Hitchcock, solo, with bands he put together the Egyptians and Venus 3, and in collaboration with many others, would totter down his gnomic surreal pathways always, staying true thus to the psychedelic banner, and delivering of himself at least one more stone classic.