Not since the golden days of Sixties protest pop has there been a politically motivated singer and songwriter of such striking originality and eloquent conviction as Robert Wyatt. A respected member of Britain's fringe rock community since his late-Sixties tenure with the acid-jazz band Soft Machine, Wyatt has been lobbying for change these past few years from a wheelchair (to which he's been confined since a 1973 accident), tuning into world music and news on shortwave radio and, in turn, broadcasting his own sharp, sometimes gently ironic commentaries on record. Even top singing newspapers like Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs lacked the glowing, selfless world view Wyatt projects on his most recent albums, particularly on Nothing Can Stop Us, a mostly-covers collection of U.K. recordings dating back to 1983.

Wyatt's '83 version of Elvis Costello and Clive Langer's "Shipbuilding," which leads off Nothing Can Stop Us, is one of the most powerful political records ever made, a microcosmic scenario amplified with macrocosmic force. Against Steve Nieve's gray cocktail-piano chords, Wyatt's eerie neutral voice combines the fear of approaching war clouds with guarded optimism about getting badly needed employment. That same poignant uncertainty transforms Chic's "At Last I Am Free" into a striking, funereal hymn; Wyatt's nervous joy in the chorus is echoed in the radiant simplicity of the arrangement – piano, discreet electronics, a little timpani.

Where most modern pop records have all the musical energy of a walk around the block, Nothing Can Stop Us is a trip around the world, from the Indian-raga gallop of "Grass" to the Cuban anthem "Caimanera" (better known to most Americans as "Guantanamera"). What unites this album's kaleidoscopic shifts in mood and scene is Wyatt's belief that this is all rebel music, a universal show of defiance against social and emotional oppression.

Old Rottenhat (first issued in Britain last year) is rather pedantic in comparison. Wyatt's lyrics frequently read like excerpts from the Daily Worker. "I think that what you're frightened of more than anything/Is knowing you need workers more than they need you," he intones in "Alliance." But Old Rottenhat is every bit as striking as Nothing Can Stop Us in execution – basic, often grim keyboards are played over stately rhythms, and Wyatt sings more like a beleaguered revolutionary than a Marxist cheerleader. "The Age of Self" is particularly potent, with Wyatt questioning socialism's life expectancy in the I-Buy decade over a stark Latin swing.

For Robert Wyatt, this music is not just a means to an end; its intimate, articulate force is liberating in itself. "We get so out of touch/Words take the place of meaning," he repeats over and over again in the haunting "Gharbzadegi." Together, Nothing Can Stop Us and Old Rottenhat succeed where all those words fail. (RS 488)

DAVID FRICKE