This is getting to be a regular and welcome occurrence. ROBYN HITCHCOCK writes a couple of great songs, puts together an excellent band and records them, then treats us to a killer new 7″ single. In this case, Hitchcock recruited The Nashville Fabs, the very same group he took out on the road last fall, to accompany him. I saw them in Seattle at the Neptune Theater and it was a pretty good show, though the band was a little rough around the edges as it was the beginning of the tour. The Fabs apparently found their groove on “Sunday Never Comes” and its B-side because this slab o’ wax is definitely polished and ready for presentation.
Recorded in December 2018 and therefore a couple of months after I saw Rob & the Fabs, these two tracks show that the guys – handpicked by Hitchcock from players populating his current hometown of Nashville – are capable of heights only hinted at a couple of months earlier. Indeed, the members of the band have a pretty impressive collective pedigree so it’s not that surprising that “Sunday Never Comes,” a classic Robyn Hitchcock mid tempo groove, is such a satisfying record. The tunes sound similar to the arrangements on Robyn Hitchcock, RH’s eponymous release from 2017 (I reviewed it here), a fairly spare four-piece (two guitars, bass, drums) affair that recalled the records he made with The Egyptians in the ’80s. 
What’s decidedly different is that Hitchcock has mostly moved on from writing about animals, insects and frogs (though they weren’t so much the subject matter as the vessels for transport), and his arrangements lack a lot of the superfluous gloss. The A-side was written for the film Juliet Naked and had only been available as a demo for download (see the video below for what that sounds like; it’s quite nice played solo!), while “Take Off Your Bandages” is “a psychedelic manifesto for the current era, inspired by the activism of the students at [Marjorie] Stoneman Douglas High School.” Indeed, both songs have a psychy edge to them, as if The Egyptians were imported from their sarcophagi, sans the trappings of late Eighties record production. Quite fabulous, I must say.
The 7″ single – available only through Hitchcock’s website – is limited to a thousand copies and comes in a nice picture sleeve. You also get downloads of the two songs, plus a longer version of the B-side. In all, an enjoyable seven or eight minutes and hopefully a harbinger of things to come.
3.5/5 (Tiny Ghost TG-02, 2019)
NuDisc 