I have to admit most of the albums on this countdown list are flawed one way or another—bum tracks mainly, sometimes swamping the good stuff (see Donna Summer’s I Remember Yesterday, down at #47, where you’re better off just getting “I Feel Love” as a single). But Robyn Hitchcock’s third solo album I Often Dream of Trains may be the exception—a nearly perfect album start to finish, bracketed by the lovely piano instrumental “Nocturne” (“Prelude” and “Demise”). The album tends to stay within itself yet exceeds all goals. It probably belongs higher on this list but it’s too late for that now. Like Todd Rundgren on A Wizard, a True Star, the set finds one person alone in the studio with his thoughts. James Fletcher plays saxophone on one song (“Flavor of Night”), Chris Cox plays bass on one other (“Ye Sleeping Knights of Jesus”). The rest is Hitchcock, often overdubbing intricate and beautiful harmonies on the vocals. The mood is far more austere and elegiac than Rundgren’s. Hitchcock’s piano and acoustic guitar are a simple, hushed accompaniment to his prolific casual flights of surreal lyrics, all packed up with semi-opaque psychotherapy-related meaning. Hitchcock’s weird scenes and people, his blurring the lines of mental illness and treating death candidly as an interesting sideshow, all of it somehow often hilariously funny—they are given center stage where they arguably belong in his work. Most of it has been accompanied by bands. I Often Dream of Trains is psychedelic in the way many of these songs can function as earworms, ringing in your brain for days, where the strange words enable the strange, chilly way of thinking to emerge. This music is filled with dread yet equally full of elfin and beguiling touches.
The ghost of perhaps even Sigmund Freud hovers over these proceedings, from the title forward. The novelty song “Uncorrected Personality Traits,” a 1:46 a cappella number, may be the single purest distillation here. But you must be prepared to endure an epic earworm of Kars 4 Kids proportions. It reminds me in many ways of Joni Mitchell’s “Twisted,” also an earworm. But it’s so twisted it makes “Twisted” look like a reusable drinking straw. Hit it, Robyn: “Uncorrected personality traits that seem whimsical in a child / May prove to be ugly in a fully grown adult / Lack of involvement with the father, or overinvolvement with the mother / Can result in lack of ability to relate to sexual peers.” The program for life is found in the bridge: “The spoiled baby grows into / The escapist teenager who’s / The adult alcoholic who’s / The middle-aged suicide. / (Oy!).” Extra points for prescience, recognizing and acknowledging transsexuality in various ways, tongue in cheek, daffy and gentle: “Even Marilyn Monroe was a man, but this tends to get overlooked / By our mother-fixated, overweight, sexist media.” Wut? That’s just one song on this original set of 14 so I’ll leave off about it now. “Sometimes I Wish I Was a Pretty Girl” is another that hits similarly. Many more tracks here are warm evocations one way or another, such as “Cathedral” and “Ye Sleeping Knights of Jesus” with their obvious gospel overtones. “Trams of Old London” indulges a wry nostalgia that feels like Dickens. I Often Dream of Trains is largely a comfortable album, standing up well to daily listens. The stranger songs are often the shortest, with longer songs that follow, letting your brain marinate, deceptively, as when “Uncorrected Personality Traits” is followed by “Sounds Great When You’re Dead.” As I say, some of the greatest pleasures here come hours and days later, when the album is only playing in your head. Hitchcock has made a good number of albums in a long career, but this one still sounds like the best to me. And even after all these years it still has new things to disclose too. Play in darkened rooms, in winter, with lava lamps.
Earworm psychedelia.
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