Robyn Hitchcock: Ole! Tarantula : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

The Venus 3 -- guitarist Peter Buck, drummer Bill Rieflin and Scott McCaughey on bass and other stuff -- are most of the Minus 5. They are also the best electric band British singer-fabulist Robyn Hitchcock has had since the Soft Boys. Hitchcock has a knockout gift for Beatlesque melodicism, and the Venus 3 rev it up here with a beat-combo drive and star-shine twang that sound like Murmur in space. Hitchcock's deft lyric blend of 1966 Bob Dylan and the pre-unhinged Syd Barrett -- acute observation set in exotic parable -- is also in full bloom here, with an intensified realism that mirrors the times. "Belltown Ramble" starts as cheerful fantasia but takes a hard turn into current events: "He says, 'What have you got?'/You say, 'I don't have anything'/He says, 'You must have oil.'" Hitchcock also makes the dead speak -- beautifully -- in "N.Y. Doll." Written in the voice of the late Arthur Kane, the song is part requiem, part affirmation of the great democracy in rock & roll: how anyone can be a star, however briefly. "I was a New York Doll/I was really something," Hitchcock sings as Kane, with the stunned wonder of a ghost amazed and grateful for how he once mattered in this world.