I'm trying to think of any other individual who has managed to keep on chucking them out for four decades without any evidence of sag. I'm sure they exist, but excepting Billy Childish no-one springs to mind right now - and obviously I'm excluding bands on the grounds that they can replenish themselves with younger members as the older ones kick the bucket or otherwise run out of steam. Eric seems to have had about ten quiet years in there somewhere, but you'll have a tough time identifying the comeback point on your wall chart given that I'm not convinced he ever fully went away, and the pinnacle of his musical career seems to be what he's doing right now, at least since AmERICa.
If you're familiar with any of the arguably better publicised stuff from before the internet, you'll know what to expect up to a point, and this is quite clearly the same man who recorded Reconnez Cherie and Whole Wide World - the uncertain warble in the voice, a faint trace of punk rock without being a dick about it, the suggestion of everything held together by sheer force of will, songs which sound as though they've been punched in the face so many times that they've stopped noticing, but above all the suspicion that nothing can keep this man down. The rock and roll basics have evolved into something approaching psychedelia without getting too affected. The distortion of songs about to collapse under their own weight on Construction Time and Demolition has been further developed into something which might look like a significantly more pissed off Jonathan Richman covering mid-period Beatles whilst trying to drown out the noise of Stereolab rehearsing in the next room, at least if seen from a fast moving vehicle - but that's just because language sometimes lets us down, leading to sentences which look like the one I've just written. Without even being particularly lacking in cheer, Eric's music seems to capture that frame of mind where you're so irredeemably fucked off or bewildered or otherwise beaten down by the forces of everything which is shite in the world that you can't even be bothered getting upset over it, not anymore; and so there's something weirdly comforting here, like he's the only one in the entire firmament who could possibly understand.
To be fair, as a fellow immigrant, an old bloke and another former resident of the Medway towns who moved to America, it could simply be that I'm suffering from overidentification with someone in the same boat, or at least a similar boat, and the previous paragraph is at least as ridiculous as I suspect it may well be; but whatever the case, Transcience really nails it for me, describing a lot of my present existence, particularly how it feels and why half of it makes no sense - the dead ends all over the place, and those tiny fucking houses. I've a feeling this means that there probably isn't anything useful I can say about this record except that it's genuinely wonderful, and Eric is probably the Bob Dylan of my generation, or someone of equivalent stature who didn't end up hanging out with that complete knob from ELO.
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