Robert Wyatt has the saddest voice in rock, which is fitting-- he's had plenty to be sad about, beginning with the 1973 accident that left him confined to a wheelchair. But Wyatt has also long been relatively at ease with his injury, if not sanguine, and has used his perch to take account of the world around him, growing increasingly politicized as the 1970s progressed and Margaret Thatcher ascended the ranks of power in the UK. At times his politics has overshadowed his music and, in the case of "Shipbuilding", even granted him a minor hit.
Not that Wyatt is anyone's idea of a traditional rock singer. Since his days drumming in Soft Machine through his work as a solo artist, he's carved out a pretty unique position for himself as an almost anti-pop star. Like latter-day Scott Walker, Wyatt's essentially created his own genre, a mish-mash of jazz, art-rock, and experimental music. It's also, as with recent Walker, equally compelling and challenging, but as much as Wyatt requires concentration, his albums are generally emotionally rewarding and only confrontational in their eerie serenity.
Despite the preternatural calm in Wyatt's amazing voice, here he seems more agitated than ever. Describing his new album Comicopera in the press notes, Wyatt reveals an almost tragic distaste for the direction western civilization has taken. Indeed, the album ends with Wyatt singing in Spanish and Italian as a declared form of protest. "It's to do with feeling completely alienated from Anglo-American culture at this point," he says. "Just sort of being silent as an English-speaking person, because of this fucking war. The last thing I sing in English is 'You've planted all your everlasting hatred in my heart.'"
Those are strong words from someone so famously gentle, and in fact Comicopera ("comic opera") proceeds along a three-act structure. It begins with "Lost In Noise", a five-song suite (mostly written with poet and partner Alfreda Benge) addressing the personal, broadens to "The Here and the Now" (resolutely political) and ends with "Away With the Fairies" (where Wyatt indulges his polyglot form of protest). Wyatt is aided throughout by such regular collaborators and co-conspirators as Brian Eno, Paul Weller, and Roxy Music's Phil Manzanera.
Delineated acts aside, the disc maintains a certain sonic consistency, carefully balancing discord with grace; the structure does pay off, however-- particularly the first two-thirds. "Lost in Noise" begins with "Stay Tuned", a mournful Anja Garbarek song, but it's the astounding duet with Monica Vasconcelos, "Just as You Are", and the spacious chamber pop of "You You" that stick out as highlights.
With "The Here and the Now", things turn rueful and cynical, if deceptively poppier. "A Beautiful Place" (an Eno co-write) and "Be Serious" are an agnostic's stab at spiritualism; "How can I express myself when there's no self to express?" is the latter's take on religion's habit of doing the thinking for its adherents. "Mob Rule", "A Beautiful War", and "Out of the Blue" comprise Wyatt's state of the world dissection. The first song addresses the build up to war, and the second the deceptively sunny disposition of a soldier after a successful military run. "Out of the Blue" then switches the perspective from the bomber to the bombed. It's this victim that seethes with "everlasting hatred."
By necessity and by design, this is also where the disc loses focus, and Wyatt begins to rely on some dissolute fragments (including one actually called "Fragment"), the poetry of Federico García Lorca, and the music of Cuban composer Carlos Puebla, whose tribute to Che Guevara, "Hasta Siempre Comandante", ends the album on a mischievously radical note.
Forget for the moment that Guevara spent far too much of his later life fighting against many of the very freedoms that Wyatt (one assumes) holds dear. The song's message is still clear enough. It's Wyatt's subversive equivalent of "Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?", a venerable lefty's call for a return to lost values, a cry for revolution from someone for whom violence, let alone a raised voice, is one step beyond a last resort. It hangs there at the end of the disc like a question left unanswered.
