MATCHING MOLE

Robert Wyatt's first album as a band leader, following his exit from Soft Machine, shows the broad range of his musical interests - almost all of which were being ignored by his former band at this point, with their fourth and fifth albums being devoted to fairly strait-laced jazz fusion. Not that there's no jazz influence here - far from it - but the album is infused with Wyatt's hitherto-stifled personality, from the touching love song O Caroline that opens the album (the simplest track) to the more challenging, free jazz-influenced material that follows.

At times, the album sounds like a more approachable, tighter, and interesting version of Wyatt's An End of an Ear, his voice-as-instrument solo album; at other points, it sounds like rough sketches for Hatfield and the North. The latter part isn't so surprising, since after the demise of the Mole guitarist Phil Miller became a founder of Hatfield and the North, and the most Hatfield-sounding song on the album, Part of the Dance, is actually a Miller composition.

The second Matching Mole album was a bit more diverse in its songwriting - the majority of the material here is by Wyatt, but that's really no surprise considering that by the time of his exit from Soft Machine he must have had quite a stash of juicy musical ideas which had been glossed over by his former band. I think it's a vitally important album both to Wyatt's discography and to the development of the Canterbury scene as a whole.