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IVH: The Soft Boys / Underwater Moonlight [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-01-09

Tonight’s selections from The Soft Boys’ second album, 1980’s Underwater Moonlight. Erudite and ridiculous. Featuring Robyn Hitchcock and Kimberly Rew (later of Katrina & the Waves).

The Soft Boys opened their 1979 debut album, A Can Of Bees, with “Give It To The Soft Boys.” That’s what I’m about to do with this here review… praise, that is. For Underwater Moonlight is a stone-cold classic of neo-retro-psychedelic jangle pop, ablaze with memorable tunes and brilliant lyrics. According to some smart folks, it represents the peak of singer-songwriter-guitarist Robyn Hitchcock’s long, fruitful career. On certain days, I agree with that observation. The album kicks off with one of the greatest one-two punches in rock history. “I Wanna Destroy You” might be the ultimate righteous-revenge anthem. Musically, this is one of the most effusive and potent power-pop songs ever, but lyrically it’s utterly sulphuric in its vengefulness—against the media, apparently. And man does it feel good when Hitchcock euphoniously yelps into the chorus; the “I”s here just explode. — Jive Time

I Wanna Destroy You

If rock and roll is, as has always been said, the music of demonic teenage possession, of raving thugs and floozies possessed by illegal chemicals and their own lower extremities, then how come so much of it's about being uncomfortable? Few rock songs have been written solely about the explosive, orgiastic joy of unbound pleasure. In fact, most deal with the stress, anxiety and loathing that results from a lack of contentedness. Even songs that do focus on satisfaction generally mention the stress, anxiety and loathing that results from too much of it. Boiled down to its essence, rock and roll isn't about the wild pleasures of having a good time; it's about-- all together, now-- stress, anxiety and loathing. With such a set of themes, the question becomes, "What are you supposed to do with this mess?" No group has ever drawn a bead on this problem like the Soft Boys. Their definitive statement on the subject, Underwater Moonlight, taps into all the icky, oozing rage and fear that are necessary parts of adolescence, and, thus, the primary interests of its ideal audience. Thanks to both the roiling undercurrents of the music and the vague, paranoid rantings of singer/guitarist/songwriter Robyn Hitchcock, Underwater Moonlight sounds like a record by the nicest bar band in Freud's crazed Id. And as an added bonus, the album's not nearly as bleak and freaky as that description suggests. It's the darkest, heaviest light pop album anyone's ever made. — Pitchfork

Positive Vibrations

Underwater Moonlight is a rare kind of magical little record, and its predecessor A Can of Bees comes very close. These two albums remain seminal; they belong to a period of rock history where influence and popularity couldn’t be less aligned. Just like the Velvet Underground, Big Star, and Television, the Soft Boys lacked a neat and tidy marketing classification but launched a thousand bands in their wake. And just like their American counterpart, Television, this Cambridge four-piece took the notion that two-guitar rock bands need to be blues-based and completely messed with it. Robyn Hitchcock and Kimberley Rew brewed up their two-pronged attack where neither one really played rhythm, but you couldn’t correctly call either one the lead, either. To say that the Soft Boys’ songs were angular is an understatement, and their willingness to revel in their “Englishness” is probably what caused them to go unnoticed – in some parts of the world, anyway – for so long. — Pop Matters

Insanely Jealous of You

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The record generally concerned to be the group’s masterpiece, 1980’s Underwater Moonlight, is a refinement in as much as it reins in the more goonish aspects of the debut, allowing the melodies to shine and Hitchcock’s bizarre, occasionally lurid, lyrics to take a more prominent role. Opener ‘I Wanna Destroy You’ is a perfect distillation of all this; a driving rocker that is momentarily a ringer for ‘Teenage Kicks’, a comparison which is obliterated by the falsetto vocal harmonies of the chorus. Hitchcock’s voice is also transformed from the slurred drawl on A Can of Bees: amongst the glam power chords of ‘I Wanna Destroy You’ he struts with a Bowie-redolent vivaciousness, while ‘Kingdom of Love’ has the detached knowingness of Lou Reed, enhanced by a streetwise walking bassline. Despite obvious nods to a number of musical inspirations, The Soft Boys manage to assimilate it all nicely with their catchy rascality shining through. The difference with Underwater Moonlight is that they don’t sabotage their tunes with noise or impenetrable lyrics. Rather, ‘Kingdom of Love’ is augmented by the sudden burst of ringing guitars and saccharine vocal harmonies and the exuberant surf-pop of ‘Positive Vibrations’ is given a mischievous twist by way of a twanging sitar break, several years before Echo and the Bunnymen tried to blend post-punk and psychedelia. — Drowned in Sound

Underwater Moonlight

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The Soft Boys weren’t that far adrift from the punks. They grew (as did many punk outfits) out of a pub-rocking covers band with the raw garage feel that usually had little to do with such hip forebears as The Stooges and The New York Dolls, and a lot to do with less-than-total instrumental proficiency – albeit The Soft Boys actually wanted to be proficient. Without Hitchcock, that’s probably all they ever would have been: another Cambridge pub band, too stuffy and fussed about musicianship to be punks, too uninspired to be anything else. But Hitchcock was a highly gifted songwriter, whose songs prefigured and influenced the 60s-tinged revivals in both Britain and the US during the 80s – and surpassed much of them, at that. Peter Buck has gone on record as saying that R.E.M. were more influenced by The Soft Boys than by The Byrds. By the time R.E.M. released Radio Free Europe in 1981, The Soft Boys were defunct. It’s one thing to be influential, another to stand the test of time. Often, “influential” is a word applied to bands too affectionately remembered to be described as, “Dated, and quickly superseded by those who improved upon their ideas.” Fortunately for The Soft Boys, they made Underwater Moonlight, an album which could hardly date as it wasn’t in the least bit of its time, or any other, and which is nigh-on un-improvable. The familiar assertion that a record, “Could have been made any time in the last [x] years” simply doesn’t apply. It’s not fey enough to have come from 1966’s school of tea-and-crumpets pysch. It’s too knowing to have originated in 1968, too concise to have trundled out of 1973. It sounds too little like a brain haemorrhage recorded on a dictaphone for 1977; it is nowhere near angsty, arty or overcoated enough for 1980 (when it was made); nor is it sufficiently winsome for the 1989-91 jangle epidemic. It’s very, very odd. — The Quietus

Wey Wey Hep Uh Hole

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WHO’S TALKING TO WHO?

Jimmy Kimmel: Timothée Chalamet, the Lumineers

Jimmy Fallon: Cameron Diaz, Jamie Foxx, Gabriel Iglesias, Pete Lee

Stephen Colbert: Ben Stiller, June Squibb

Seth Meyers: Sebastian Stan, Auli'i Cravalho

After Midnight: Dustin Nickerson, Russell Howard, Aparna Nancherla

Watch What Happens Live: Glenn Close

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