Robert Wyatt

DISCOGRAPHY

End of an Ear (1970) 7.5/10

Matching Mole: Matching Mole (1972) 7/10 +

Matching Mole: Little Red Record (1972) 6.5/10

Rock Bottom (1974) 8/10

Ruth Is Stranger Than Richard (1975) 5/10

The Animals Film (soundtrack, 1982) 7/10

Old Rottenhat (1985) 5/10

Dondestan (1991) 6.5/10

Shleep (1997) 6/10

Cuckooland (2003) 6/10

Comicopera (2007)

For the Ghosts Within (2010) - with Gilad Atzmon and Ros Stephen

See also Soft Machine

   The simultaneous joy and horror that make up Wyatt's Rock Bottom took a while to really hit me. His child-like vocals and lyrical wordplay imply either infantile playfulness or tragic insanity. On the whole, the music becomes a portrait of the giddiness in fairy tales contrasted with mental illness. But the open intentions of the album being about love make all the meshed darkness and lunacy quite optimistic and even beautiful. 

   Sea Song starts this emotional onslaught with a tropical bongo-rhythm paired with a stinging drone of aquatic synth. A grand piano highlights the melody of a nursery rhyme, and then an electronic chamber choir crafts a disturbing funereal atmosphere -- a tone that is equally ominous as redemptive (in the spiritual sense). But then the nursery rhyme evaporates and we are left floating in a psychedelic phase of Wyatt's tonal jazz-warbling, counterpointed by a higher pitch of synth that scales around Wyatt's voice, all the while a flowing bassline gently throbs beneath them. The song throws the listener on a desolate canoe, rocking with the waves of the water, and at track two, the listener falls in.

   A Last Straw delivers a relative state of peace with its introduction, some light cymbals and bass preparing around a soft synth lead. 

   The most succinct way to describe the tension of Rock Bottom is to picture yourself walking the halls of a quiet hospital -- their silence meaning that either everybody's well, or everybody's dead. 

   Ruth Is Stranger Than Richard almost recycles the Canterbury progressions of Rock Bottom, minus the otherworldly feelings. 

   In 2009, Wyatt sung poems by Arthur Rimbaud on BBC Radio 3.