Love From London
This British singer-songwriter and psychedelic cult hero keeps issuing delightful, incisive rec ords, and this is one of his recent best – an album Syd Barrett might have made if he’d stayed cogent and seen the end of days. Love From London is 10 songs of chiming folk-rock grace and slippery black humor in which apocalypse falls gently, to spidery picking, in “Be Still,” and with stately Beatlesque piano in “Stupefied.” Hitchcock also evokes the radical-Seventies John Lennon with the crunchy contempt for thieving financiers in “Fix You.” “Day breaks/Like an egg,” Hitchcock warns in the closing “End of Time,” but with the trippy reassuring tone of someone who plans to fully enjoy the time he has left.