The Sole Inhabitant

Album review

Thomas Dolby issued this live recording, made at Martyrs in Chicago, Illinois in May of 2006, just as there were some stirrings of a revival of interest in his work; ironically, EMI would re-release his Golden Age of Wireless album in all of its permutations, augmented with his early-'80s concert Live Wireless as a DVD, just a couple of years later. But this 21st century presentation of Dolby's work is not to be ignored. Vocally, the man has not only seemingly failed to age a day, but he has become more expressive with age, so that end of the performance is spot-on for anyone with fond memories of pieces such as "Flying North," "One of Our Submarines," "Europa and the Pirate Twins," or "She Blinded Me With Science," all represented here. There isn't a lot of live ambience in terms of audience response or interaction, but the audio is excellent and the performance ultimately bracing and thoroughly satisfying; the tempos are sometimes pulled back a bit, but the instrumentation is more complex and involved, and rewarding. And "The Flat Earth" is so finely sung and played as to be one of the finest things that Dolby has ever done, at any time in his career, and worth the price of the disc by itself. Indeed, if you're splitting philosophical and aesthetic hairs, this release could easily qualify as a live "best-of" for the man's work, while the EMI versions just as easily come off as works-in-progress. The Sole Inhabitant has been released as a single CD, and as a CD/DVD combination, and the latter constitutes a very different animal from this single-disc version. The DVD is from a concert at the Berklee Performance Center in Boston several months later. For obvious reasons, Dolby isn't the most physically animated performer on-stage, surrounded by his electronic devices (one gets the feeling he might've preferred that synthesizers had stayed what they were in the late '60s, looking less like musical instruments than computers). But the camera keeps moving, and the visuals never get repetitive, and he interacts extensively (and charmingly, often funnily) with his audience. The ambience is different from the CD, too, with a much closer and louder audience, and this is just as satisfying as the CD, but in a different way, presenting a good measure of concert immediacy. And it's loaded up with bonus material at the end that extends it well past an hour in length, and all of the latter is worth watching and hearing.
© Bruce Eder /TiVo