Robyn Hitchcock: Uncorrected Personality Traits

Here's the easiest decision the music-buying public will have to make this season—whether or not to buy a collection of 20 amazing songs from Robyn Hitchcock's first nine albums. Hitchcock is, of course, one of the greats, and an analysis of his work is almost superfluous. His dark humor and brilliant songwriting is like nothing else from the 20 years he's been around. Though often self-consciously weird and emotionally blatant, Hitchcock's music has never been boring, and has succeeded in actually being moving on occasion. He and his music are that rare thing among pop artists; they are important. That being said, Hitchcock's greatest-hits set has all the clichéd traits of the best examples of that recording phenomenon: It must have been hard to choose from so many great songs; there are some jarring omissions; every song on here is an absolute treasure, and so on. Of course, the lucky person already owns all the recordings from which these songs are taken. The slightly less lucky, or less curious, can be happy with Uncorrected Personality Traits. The luckiest of all are those who use this fine collection to discover Hitchcock's singular work for the first time.