2003’s Music in a Foreign Language saw Lloyd Cole’s first self-recorded effort. It’s a fairly muted affair without percussion or electric guitars. Lloyd pitches in on guitar, bass, piano and of course vocals, with contributions from Neil Clark on guitar and Dave Derby on lap steel.
The title track introduces proceedings, setting the tone for the album with gently picked guitar and soft keyboards. Behind the soft, almost easy-listening instrumentation lies a dark, brooding heart, which reveals itself in the lyrics of many of the songs, chief amongst them My Other Life (“clearly you can see my clothes are torn, clearly this demands an explanation”).
Proceedings here are, for want of a better word, “mature”. This is never clearer than in a new version of No More Love Songs, Lloyd driving the point home by re-recording the song. It’s a fuller, more-realised version with keening steel guitar which for my money, works a little better than the more stripped-down original recording.
Lloyd takes on the challenge of Nick Cave’s People Ain’t No Good, and falls marginally short, though it’s still a relatively pleasant version. The inclusion of this song is perhaps Lloyd’s way of making a point? He saves the best for last with Shelf Life, a deeply moody lament about how he is “consumed by delusions of grandeur” over a softly picked guitar and a bright keyboard part, making this an almost stately kind of ballad, a perfect accompaniment to shortening evenings as “the night’s drawing in”.
It’s fairly different to any of Lloyd’s previous work. Very tasteful without any blandness, this is the type of thing the likes of Leonard Cohen should be doing now.
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