It’s typical Hitchcockian perversity that a CD called Goodnight Oslo is not a live album, but second-guessing this 55-year-old pop eccentric is still next to impossible. To his detractors, Robyn Hitchcock is the musical equivalent of Monty Python, a highly quotable choice of anglophiles excited by hearing the word “settee” in a pop lyric. Hitchcock's healthy surrealism is still intact — who else would sing of heart disease and gout with gorgeous harmonies, as he does on "Saturday Groovers"? More often than not on Goodnight Oslo, Hitchcock's words resonate: "I'd walk a thousand miles to be alone" on "Your Head Here," and "Once in your life make it be good, make it sustain" on "Sixteen Years." Had it come six years earlier, the lean spiritual "Hurry for the Sky" would have made a good choice for Johnny Cash on his American Recordings.

The credit crunch of the music business prompted better, leaner albums from Hitchcock, rather than attempts to convert a cult following to mainstream success. Hitchcock does so on Goodnight Oslo backed by the recently christened Venus 3: Peter Buck, Scott McCaughey and Bill Rieflin. Buck and Hitchcock's musical relationship spans 20 years, without the malaise of Buck’s recent R.E.M. work. Since Buck can work out his Plastic Ono Band and Piper at the Gates of Dawn fantasies here, "I'm Falling" features his trademark chime, while "Sixteen Years" offers nearly everything an R.E.M. fan craves. At six minutes, the title track is the epic of the album, its cinematic references to frozen trains and Norwegian speed proving more evocative than straightforward. Even after 30 years of making records, Robyn Hitchcock remains a pleasure to misread.