Rating: NNNN
There are no coincidences in the wacky world of Robyn Hitchcock. So the story goes, after seeing a Gillian Welch concert where she performed her new song Look At Miss Ohio, Hitchcock received an e-mailed image from a beauty contest in which the newly crowned Miss Ohio happened to be a woman named Robyn Hitchcock, prompting our boy to set off for Nashville to record his new album with Welch and her sidekick David Rawlings. The duo’s rootsy, rustic sound allows Hitchcock to revert to folksinger mode for Spooked, a stripped-down strumming session that brings his unhinged lyrics into sharp focus. It’s really just a change of window dressing for Hitchcock’s haunted house, inhabited here by a typically surreal assortment of ocelots, hobgoblins, millipedes, self-ringing bells and the ghost of Virginia Woolf. Delightful.