First with his legendary band the Soft Machine and then as a solo artist, Robert Wyatt has never been afraid of a hefty conceit in his music. Fittingly, COMIC OPERA--his Domino records debut and first since 2003's CUCKOOLAND--continued Robert Wyatt's impressive string of late period solo records by focusing on nothing less than the innate comedy of the human condition. Wyatt presents an opus divided into three acts--"Lost in Noise," "The Here and the Now," and "Away With the Fairies"--centered around what he called the "unpredictable mischief of real life."As with all of his '00s output, Wyatt trades in the exploratory psych-prog of his early '70s work in favor of elegant and ornate jazz arrangements. His voice--an unsung treasure of British rock--remains the centering constant here, as Wyatt's orchestrations swing from the mellow and alluring ("Just As You Are" and "You You") to the disquieting ("Fragment" and "Cancion de Julieta," which also find Wyatt abandoning English in favor of Spanish and Italian lyrics). While Wyatt's conceptual ambitions might be hard to grasp in detail, the tracks haunt and never need elaboration, placing COMIC OPERA amongst his best works as a solo artist.
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