Lloyd Cole’s 2006 album Antidepressant follows previous album Music in a Foreign Language’s muted template. The songs here take their time to reveal themselves and standout.Lyrically, it finds Lloyd in wry form here, right from the start with the acoustic strum of The Young Idealists – “I know I said I favoured peaceful resolution but that was when we were the young idealists… young idealists raging through the coffee shops and bars”. The idea of Lloyd and his ilk raging is amusing and somewhat unlikely, particularly on this bed of soothing keyboards, guitars and programmed beats.
The production is quiet and dampened down which means many tracks (Woman In A Bar, and the appropriately named I Didn’t See It Coming) drift by barely noticed. New York City Sunshine makes a greater impression with a pleasing string arrangement and an acoustic solo midway through. The title track sees him rock out in his Negatives mode, singing “with my medication I will be fine” and later some wonderful lyrics: “first she’s gonna tire of my fixations, then she’s gonna tire of my face".
How Wrong Can You Be? has an unhurried tune, a perfect song to brood to over a cup of coffee. A pair of country shufflers feature here, Everysong and Travelling Light, the latter of which has hints of Johnny Cash’s I Walk The Line.
In a similar way to his previous album, this one finishes with a downbeat, moody track, in this case Rolodex Incident. It’s an album worth paying attention to and persevering with, which is required for the better tracks here to shine.
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