As I understand, the last half of Little Red Riding Hood Hit the Road is exactly the first half played backwards. This means that if you play the song backwards, it should sound the same

Not much left to say after AfterHours' essay. Even better than the tracks themselves, what makes this legendary is the overall feeling it gives you. The "breathing" present throughout the tracks, the weird time-warped feeling you get at the middle of Red Riding Hood, Wyatt's singing on the Sea Song, they all contribute to creating one of the best atmospheres. Along with some pretty neat tracks, make up for one of the greatest masterpieces to come from modern music.

Wow. This is such a unique and beautiful album.

One of the best things about this album is the space and how the instruments drop in notes here and there in a lumbering sort of jazzy way. That's one of the most pain stricken albums to ever come out: Robert Wyatt, straggling to regain his life after an accident that left him in a wheelchair made one of the most personal and brave albums ever to be made. He explores his pain in an almost childish way and comes out with one of the most innovative and forward thinking music of it's era, an album that still echoes as fresh today as it was when it came out.

This must be the saddest piece of rock music ever to be created.

HE IS KNOWS CANNOT SAY

It is only within the last two decades that rock critics in the mainstream media have given anything like adequate recognition to one of rock music's all-time supreme works of genius - an astounding work of originality that is crafted in the 'stream of consciousness' method reminiscent of Van Morrison's 'Astral Weeks'.

With 'Rock Bottom'(1974), Robert Wyatt, vocalist, drummer and composer extraordinaire, vented his persona with an intense emotional religious hymn and child-like nursery rhyme sensitivity set within a musical soundscape that transfigured both rock and jazz.

Wyatt's uniquely original falsetto jazz-singing style, is a cross between soul, Buddhist mantra and pyschedlia that while an acquired taste to some, remains a thing of tenderness and supreme beauty.

'Rock Bottom' is a frail, tender and original masterwork encompassing happiness, sorrow, faith and resignation within a metaphysical unity.

Wyatt was and old wise forty years ago. It's an unforgettable album full of agony and death but too of life and love. A must.

The second half's lyrics are so beautifully bizarre, I love it.

Here's an updated review I just posted on www.listology.com (another great site)..."Arranged as a complete bout of stream-of-consciousness, cast from a holy scripting of instrumental brotherhood, comes a deep exhale of "oneness" steeped in universal tragedy and spearheaded by a trance of destiny through an enigmatic malaise, Wyatt assumes an improbable plethora of emotional identities, each magnified by an impossible sense of self awareness and clarity that, en masse, forces into existence an otherwise impenetrable subjectivity of the greatest integrity, character and conviction. In a communal mustering of the affinities of the universe: elemental, spiritual, physical and natural, the work progresses as a prodigal event. A happening. Not just a recording of an event, but a miracle unfolding. As a single entity where each aspect is interconnected to a greater whole, a single thrust, a single emotion that encapsulates within it, all emotions, all expressions, all viewpoints and beingness. A spiritual ascension that, incredibly, becomes increasingly disoriented, flummoxed and senseless the more awareness it acquires, the more profundity it emotes; thus mired in an ultimate dichotomy, blossoming from a gradually upending kaleidescope of succumbing emotional episodes. Sea Song, fraught with a narcotic, otherworldly milieu and contemplated by a profound, painfully heavy impression of sorrow, is a funeral march on a despairing search for answers. It magically erupts into a submerged, overwhelmed choir and then into the passionate, lost grief of Wyatt's lone, plaintive and confused cries as the keyboards strike repeating chords, haunting and ominous. A Last Straw floats oceanic, ascending and descending in eternal swim. It moves in an unorthodox, cyclic, rhythmic pulse as Wyatt calls out like a dying, drowning mammal, in between flexibly patterned, elastic percussion before the bottom drops out in a series of descending, increasingly dreadful, low notes. Little Red Riding Hood Hit the Road explodes in a sensational, vibrant show, a coalescing influx of multi-faceted liberation, the unfurling of states of being; of mind over matter; Buddhi. It is a confused, colliding series of transformations, infusing Wyatt into and out of existence. His words carry in and out of the brilliant, frenzied strobe light vacuum, slowing down, speeding up, and dramatically reversing direction into inverse semantics and back again. Alifib/Alife opens as a dramatic rebirth, an ode to his loved one, a naked solitude at the beginning of the universe. Wyatt casts tears of regret into constellations of sparkling love beneath a calm and drifting sea, and sinking ever so slowly he gradually drowns away, farther and farther from her. Beneath his lonely keyboard strokes, his voice calls out over and over in a sacred whisper of paralyzed and comatose cardiac arrest. He is praying for her from the brink of death, trying to bring himself back, trying to postulate their togetherness back into reality. Simultaneously he sings a hymn from the edge of birth, mourning their distance and failures in an aching poem of clumsy baby talk, thus dying for her and living for her, now reborn in a heartbreaking show of eternal dependency; as with a newborn to his mother. Drowning further, a gradual rise of calamity, confusion and suspense ensues. Wyatt repeats his words in a less formulated, dying stupor as narcoleptic fits take hold. Clarinet and sax figures contort and spit and squeal and squirm, anxiously contriving a strange, brewing storm of pent up intensity, before spewing out a wrenching, overflowing spastic attack of uncontrolled, unmitigated abandon, bursting and then calming into a striking and damning retort from his loved one while a haunting sense of eternal damnation seems to swell before them. Little Red Robin Hood Hit the Road explodes in a relentless storm of manic, increasingly frantic percussion and instrumental fireworks while Wyatt repeats a mantra of prayers behind the screaming call of his keyboard play, before passing out and drowning into a heavenly backdrop of dreamy viola where an awkward stupor of unintelligible vocals drift about, hypnotized and stuck indefinitely in a void and godless world."