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albummaster
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Location: Spain
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- #1
- Posted: 07/31/2023 20:00
- Post subject: Album of the day (#4607): Rock Bottom by Robert Wyatt
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Today's album of the day
Rock Bottom by Robert Wyatt (View album | Buy this album)
Year: 1974.
Country: 
Overall rank: 433
Average rating: 79/100 (from 537 votes).
Thumbnail. Click to enlarge.
Tracks:
1. Sea Song
2. A Last Straw
3. Little Red Riding Hood Hit The Road
4. Alifib
5. Alife
6. Little Red Robin Hood Hit The Road
About album of the day: The BestEverAlbums.com album of the day is the album appearing most prominently in member charts in the previous 24 hours. If an album, or artist, has previously been selected within a x day period, the next highest album is picked instead (and so on) to ensure a bit of variety. A full history of album of the day can be viewed here.
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DommeDamian
Imperfect, sensitive Aspie with a melody addiction
Gender: Male
Age: 23
Location: where the flowers grow.
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neilgee
Bless the list makers
Gender: Male
Age: 63
Location: Manchester
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- #3
- Posted: 07/31/2023 20:34
- Post subject:
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There is an idea that the downbeat feel/theme of the album was down to Robert's wheelchair confining accident as this is his first work since losing the ability to walk about.
Although it can't have been easy to adjust to the idea of being crippled for Robert In fact all the songs were already written before the accident.
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Norman Bates
Gender: Male
Age: 51
Location: Paris, France
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- #4
- Posted: 07/31/2023 20:59
- Post subject:
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Do yourself a favour.
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AfterHours
Gender: Male
Location: originally from scaruffi.com ;-)
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- #5
- Posted: 07/31/2023 22:00
- Post subject:
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| DommeDamian wrote: | | More time goes by, the more I appreciate the multi-layered madness this album is, both musically, spiritually and emotionally. Best songs imo are Sea Song and Alifib. Thank you AfterHours. |
You're welcome DD!
Certainly among the most profound, strangely and deeply moving works of art in any genre. Utterly unique and transformative, full of endless emotional/thematic ambiguity or dichotomy in every passage: happy/sad, soothing/troubling, fantastical dream/nightmare, etc. I've probably listened to it on the order of 600+ times over the last 18-19 years and it never ceases to amaze, never exhausts itself. It is possibly the greatest "Rock" album of all time and probably top 5 (or no worse than 10) all time when including all art, all forms (Rock/Jazz/Classical music, cinema, visual arts, literature, etc).
Some misc thoughts...
The album's sound world essentially expresses a bizarro "inverse" world/universe, very surreal and Dadaist, in which everything could be said to be transforming into a view of the world that incorporates "Alfred Jarry's mad, free, Dadaist/surreal, pataphysics". As the album progresses, all things take on such characteristics more and more until fully enveloped, lost in utter chaos and nonsense (that are yet "inverses" or "chaotic doubles" of real-world emotions, themes, desires, fears, psychology, etc).
Fundamentally, this is probably a deep outcry wherein the protagonist wishes to leave this world, and join or re-imagine a new one that bypasses the laws of reality, logic, physics, and (in the final, recorded versions that we hear on the album) may be a devastated result of Wyatt's crippling loss of the use of his legs (even if he has sort of denied this at times, he also has made some contradictory statements over the years).
The music may partially be as a result of Wyatt being consumed by drugs (whether painkillers or others) during much of its recording (the final versions of its songs), while he was lying there in bed in the aftermath of his crippling accident. Much of the album sounds like a waking nightmare/dream, lost in a stream-of-consciousness, a reverie, where Wyatt seems to be partially conscious/partially in a dream-state or narcotic state.
The work seems to be a deeply fearful cry and reverent ode filled with the anxiety that Alfreda may leave him, with a deeply felt dependency on her, both fearful and grateful of her loyalty in the aftermath of his crippling accident. This dependency is expressed in a profoundly personal and strange manner wherein Wyatt envisions Alfreda as his mother (or a mother figure) and becomes, in his surreal visions, a baby that is attached to her, losing all grip of himself (more and more as the album progresses), in perhaps a dreaming then nightmarish urge to eradicate himself, who he has now become (a cripple, useless and dependent in his eyes), racked with lament, inadequacy and a heartbreaking desire to be reborn. It takes on a very troubling and inexplicable duality between dream and nightmare, fatuous happiness, entrenched in sorrow and erupted by utter madness as these themes and visions intertwine and develop in increasing calamity and density over its last half.
The work has double-meaning and expression throughout, embedded in its sound world and form, in that the whole progression of it is sequenced like the protagonist transforms into something else, "dying" or "inversing himself" into that of a baby (the "funeral elegy" of Sea Song; the more obvious transformation starts taking place more climactically, in track 3, both the transformational instrumental development into a chaotic musical vacuum, and the reverse word-play devolving into nonsense). It evolves/devolves increasingly from there. The album follows the process (at least symbolically) of the birth cycle, tracks 4/5 can double to be depicting scenes where Wyatt is inside his "mother" Alfreda as his source for food and life and then the explosion of track 6 into a stupefied individual, exploding from chaos into a godless and nonsense world. That of the final moment of birth, transformed into someone else, only to have spilled out into this strange world, upon a busy street and confused, distended actions, finding himself alone and mentally unfit in a world of chaos that defies logic (is this a symbolic allusion to the feeling he had and his mental state after falling from a balcony, landing onto the ground or street below, now crippled and in an unconscious daze, baffled, confused, stupefied?).
The whole sound world of the album (all the instrumentation around Wyatt's vocals) is perhaps the most extraordinary in all rock/progressive rock history. It all has the character and quality of another "consciousness", emanating from another source, "pulsating" and shimmering, growing or developing on its own (it does not seem to be being "played" by individuals, but seems to emanate, grow and recede on its own causation). It is "all one" consciousness, otherworldly, mutating or receding. Each instrumental passage does not sound like 'itself', but 'transfigured', given an "inner", even spiritual, quality, which contributes to the sense of "another consciousness" taking hold, but also takes on a very metaphysical connotation, evolving further and further into the aforementioned and very bizarre pataphysical worlds of Jarry.
Every passage (again pulsating) is "womb-like", even seeming to be going through "birth pangs" in its arduous, resigned musical and rhythmic unfolding, and through the birth canal and inner passage of the birth process, while also doubling as the strange, dada-ist and surreal, bizarro, "inverse" world of Jarry's pataphysics.
Every passage is played in the form of a "question" or "quandary" (or at least "tenuousnous") as a line of thought. The whole album is in a state of existential quandary, of the strange world the protagonist finds himself. This follows for Wyatt's voice too, which expresses multiple sensations, dualities, ambiguous emotional content at once (at once happy and sorrowful, hopeful and resigned, etc).
The album doubles metaphorically as like that of an individual feeling profound thoughts and quandaries in the face of the immense cosmos (its musical passages also resemble the cosmos or its bodies such as: nautical, lunar landscapes/sea scapes, vortexes or black holes, the astral keyboards of Alifib...), the protagonist overwhelmed by the sight and vastness and his feeling of smallness amongst it all.
_________________
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Last edited by AfterHours on 08/04/2023 18:53; edited 5 times in total
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DommeDamian
Imperfect, sensitive Aspie with a melody addiction
Gender: Male
Age: 23
Location: where the flowers grow.
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AfterHours
Gender: Male
Location: originally from scaruffi.com ;-)
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- #7
- Posted: 08/01/2023 17:16
- Post subject:
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| DommeDamian wrote: | AH, is it okay I use some of these "misc thoughts" in my description of it on my top 100, next time I update?   |
Sure, if you'd like! Not sure how well it will translate to that format though. It's a bit off the cuff, hurried, somewhat sloppy, not really ideal for what the album truly deserves, but I suppose it gets the job done more or less. I just had a sudden urge to say some things about it and immediately did so. But as long as the "gist" of what I'm saying comes across, that was the main thing... But each track is extraordinary in a variety of ways and deserves to singled out and detailed a bit more in relation to the various aspects mentioned. And there's also quite a bit more that could be said about Wyatt's off-beat philosophical angle -- there is another level of interpretation in regards to this that deserves to be covered some day.
_________________
Best Classical
Best Films
Best Paintings
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AfterHours
Gender: Male
Location: originally from scaruffi.com ;-)
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CharlieBarley
Gender: Male
Age: 48
Location: Mount Olympus
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- #9
- Posted: 08/03/2023 21:51
- Post subject:
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Very good album
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AAL2014
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- #10
- Posted: 08/03/2023 21:51
- Post subject:
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I appreciate the excellent write up for this incredible record, AfterHours.
My first listen to Rock Bottom came the morning after my 20th birthday. I was about as hungover as I have ever been and decided to play this album while laying in bed tending to a terrible headache (drinking is overrated).
With Rock Bottom coming out of my earbuds and my cat laying on my chest, I ended up getting one of the best naps I’ve ever had due in large part to, as AfterHours mentioned, the narcotic state of the sound and some of the ASMR-esq vocal passages and sonic landscapes painted by Wyatt. One of my most memorable first experiences with an album.
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