Wreckless Eric & Amy Rigby
Wreckless Eric & Amy Rigby
Release Date: Sep 15, 2008
Genre(s): Indie, Rock, Pop
Record label: Stiff
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Album Review: Wreckless Eric & Amy Rigby by Wreckless Eric & Amy Rigby
Excellent, Based on 3 Critics
Based on rating 8/10
With Wreckless Eric back on Stiff Records for the first time in 30 years, it was easy for various listeners to say he was back on form as well. Ha! He never lost form. Indeed, the chain of albums that divides Big Smash! way back when, from Wreckless Eric & Amy Rigby today, represents one of the most startling adroit voyages in modern rock, as the occasionally novelty minded auteur behind "Waxworks," "Personal Hygiene," and "Pop Song" developed such a weary eye for modern nonsense that civilization itself should have hung its head in shame.
Based on rating 8/10
“Here comes my ship / I’ve waited so long for it”, croons Wreckless Eric (Goulden) in celebratory fashion at the start of “Here Comes My Ship”, the excellent psych-pop nugget which opens this debut album by the former ‘70s punk-rock scallywag and his onstage partner, musical collaborator, and—most recently—wife, country-pop artist Amy Rigby. That by the end of the opening song’s two minutes and 51 seconds, everything has turned to shit as an “everlasting panic attack” takes hold is nothing new for either singer/songwriter. Barbed, tongue-in-cheek fatalism has lurked in both musicians’ lyrics during their lengthy solo careers, whether it’s Goulden’s early Stiff outings like “Brain Thieves” and “Whole Wide World”, or Rigby’s mid-‘90s acerbic kitchen-sink pop vignettes that made up her startling debut Diary of a Mod Housewife.
Opinion: Very Good
In the ‘70s, Richard Thompson made some of the best music of his career by adopting a Muslim tradition of using the language of romantic love to engage in a dialogue with the almighty. Amy Rigby does something similar to sketch out her relationship with a fading American icon on “Astrovan,” her first contribution to the “he said, she said” series of songs that comprise her first album with husband Wreckless Eric (née Eric Goulden). The recent drop in gas prices notwithstanding, the latter days of the internal combustion engine seem to be upon us.