Album Review: Lloyd Cole – Lloyd Cole

Lloyd Cole released his first solo album in 1990. It promised to be a departure, as Lloyd had moved to New York and assembled a new band containing erstwhile Lou Reed/Richard Hell guitarist Robert Quine, and also Matthew Sweet and Fred Maher. Lloyd was pictured with long hair and stubble, leading to accusations of ‘rocking out’. The truth of it is the album is not quite heavy rock by any means, but more careful evolution of his sound and music.

Opening with the blissful Don’t Look Back (obvious Dylan reference there!), Lloyd does not completely reinvent himself, but more gently evolve. Indeed the aforementioned collaborators play with great subtlety on this track, with a yearning guitar solo from Quine and sighing backing vocals as Lloyd sings about “when you’re nothing to no-one” and the onset of ageing (“life seems never-ending when you’re young”) and thirtiedom a la 29 off Commotions album Mainstream. No Blue Skies was the first single and is in a similar vein, a soaring tune full of gentle, soaring guitar fills, with Lloyd lamenting “baby you’re too well read”.

So what about the rock?! What Do You Know About Love is the second track, and is a darker, brooding rocker. There’s a lovely midsection showcasing his love of New York (“it’s raining on Bleeker Street”) and the guitar work throughout the track is quite superb. Sweetheart is the rockiest track here, sounding a lot like a Lou Reed style rocker but it works really well with Lloyd’s witty lyrics: “well I guess you've really got some kind of way with words - maybe you could be a writer.” He even sounds like he’s having fun on I Hate To See You Doing That Stuff, where the band cuts loose and sound like they’re having a great time, even Lloyd singing a line or two in French can’t sink this one.

Later Ice Cream Girl is a truly uplifting piece of music, sounding breathtakingly simple yet original, again with some exceptionally good guitar work, while Undressed is a harmonica-led, Dylanesque little ditty which Ryan Adams had clearly heard before recording Heartbreaker.

It’s an excellent collection of songs and at 13 songs perhaps a little overlong, yet it’s a good starting point for discovering Lloyd Cole’s music. It’s criminal that this album hasn’t got more recognition as its fingerprints are all over rootsy alternative music these days (anything from Ryan Adams to Villagers). Incidentally it’s his 50th birthday today which I cannot believe!

Album Review: Dakota Suite / Emanuele Errante - North Green Down

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Album Review: Whiskeytown – Pneumonia

This turned out to be Whiskeytown’s final album. Its release was delayed till 2001 due to record company politics, by which time singer Ryan Adams had already embarked on a solo career.
The album itself has been described by people who have too much time on their hands as the “alt-country ‘Rumours’”, possibly due to the fact that there were a couple of relationships going on in this band. It’s not particularly country sounding, particularly in comparison to their early stuff, but there are enough steel guitar twangs and good ol’ boy drawls going on here to place it in the ballpark.

All flippancy aside, it’s both an accessible and strong collection of songs. They try their hand at a variety of styles, from soul ballads (Ballad of Carol Lynn, Easy Hearts), to REM-style folk-rock (Don’t Wanna Know Why, Don’t Be Sad, Bar Lights) to rockers (Crazy About You). Jacksonville Skyline is one of the more country sounding tracks, all pedal steel and yearning about his hometown, and is one of many fine songs on this album. The playing on this album is subtle, no instrument allowed to dominate, and it works beautifully on understated ballad Reason To Lie.

Sit and Listen To The Rain is a sprightly, widescreen moody rocker about the joys of… you’ve guessed it, sitting around. There are one or two missteps: Mirror, Mirror is too poppy for its own good in a Beatles kind of way, while Paper Moon is dangerously close to lounge cheese. So after these 2 tracks they redeem it all with some strange Nick Drake style number (What The Devil Wanted) and a great facsimile of a Bruce Springsteen ballad, even down to the title (My Hometown).

It’s all so effortless and listening to it now, I can’t help feeling that it blows away Ryan Adams’ more recent output. If any of these Whiskeytown tracks were on one of Ryan Adams’ recent albums it would be the strongest track on it.

Album Review: Gillian Welch - Time (The Revelator)

Gillian Welch is someone I'm not very familiar with, but I have been enjoying her third album, 2001's Time (The Revelator). The inclusion of "The Revelator" in the title evokes The Book of Revelations while simultaneously conjuring up visions of old bluesmen.

The actuality of the music is more of a late-night, country-tinged, gentle folk. Opening track Revelator is a downbeat folk tale, over ringing acoustic guitars which drift along in a stately fashion. It's quite jarring when just before the end she sings "leaving the valley, f**king out of sight." There's a great electrified version of this song on Ryan Adams' Destroyer bootleg, but this version is good in its own right.

Much of the rest of the album is quite bluegrass. We get banjo romps (My First Lover), glacial bluegrass (Dear Someone, Elvis Presley Blues), as well as the sparse folky tracks which really grab me. David Rawlings' contribution should also be noted, as he chips on guitar, backing vocals, not to mention co-writer and producer.

April 14th, Part I starts off quite beautifully with gentle acoustic guitar and Gillian Welch's drawling, yearning vocal. It evokes insomnia on a warm summer's night, like most of the material here. Its sister piece, Ruination Day, Part II takes the same lyrical theme in a similarly sparse musical setting.

Everything Is Free is another sparse gem, but I Dream A Highway is another thing entirely. It sounds like a kind of folk mantra, though at 14 and a half minutes it will probably lull you into a stupor. It's better than I make it sound. In fact it's a charming album, not just for ardent bluegrass fans.

Album Review: Lloyd Cole & The Commotions – Mainstream

Lloyd Cole made his name with the Commotions on 1984’s classic debut Rattlesnakes, a perfect synergy of jangly guitars and pretentious literary references. After a more commercial follow-up Easy Pieces, they returned with 1987’s ‘difficult third album’, the presumably ironically titled Mainstream. It turned out to be his last with the Commotions.

The late 1980s was a bad time for music production, and the first track on this album My Bag (my bad) reinforces this. The song isn’t particularly poor but musically it’s all choppy guitars, drum machines and staccato vocals. Lloyd does a nice line in stream of consciousness lyrics though. This is followed up with 3 slower, gentle tracks which survive Lloyd Cole’s somewhat forced vocal delivery. These are helped by less reliance on forced literary references than previous material. From the Hip is a kind of gentle musing, but 29 is more substantial, with the subject being that of impending thirtiedom. The music builds to a nice mope-along plod of a song (in a good way).

The last of these 3, the title track is a little more scathing (“all you have to do is crawl”) and the guitar work is quite Lou Reed-ish. Following track Jennifer She Said is a great American style rock song, all twangy guitars and Elvis style vocals, and it works well.

Unfortunately from there the album takes a turn for the worse. Mister Malcontent is their attempt to do U2 with a big rock song and a kind of predictable chord progression, while Sean Penn Blues is better, another stream of consciousness type track. The rest veers from faux-jazz (Big Snake) to another ‘big’ U2-ish anthem (Hey Rusty) before petering out with These Days, a kind of electronic ballad.

It was time for reinvention and Lloyd’s solo career would do just that…

Album Review: Neil Young – Hawks & Doves

Neil Young was almost peerless in the 1970s with a string of really strong albums, embracing acoustic and electric styles (with Crazy Horse). His stock was particularly high after 1979’s Rust Never Sleeps.

Very little has been written about 1980’s Hawks & Doves. It’s an odd little album. It’s split into 2 sides, Side 1 (or the first 4 tracks) being mostly acoustic – the Doves side, then Side 2 (the final 5 tracks) – the Hawks side, which is dubious country-rock of which more later.

It seems the first 4 tracks were leftovers which didn’t make his albums in the 70s, and it shows, as they are strong acoustic Neil Young songs which could have fit on any of his albums back then. Little Wing, nothing to do with the Jimi Hendrix song of the same name is a fairly slight opener. Although it’s only 2 minutes long the plaintive acoustic strum and harmonica makes it sound instantly like safe territory for the writer.

The opening 4 tracks are kind of downbeat, which suits him quite well. The Old Homestead is seven and half minutes of minimalist acoustic strum, which doesn’t change much yet it doesn’t become boring, there’s a strong melody, which evokes many of Young’s other tracks without sounding too similar too any of them. The eerie whine of an odd sounding theremin wheezes in and out of the track at intervals, with a little bass and drums here and there.

Lost In Space is a little cloying, sounding like a fairly straightforward love song. This one is a little more fleshed out, with dobro and backing vocals added to Neil’s acoustic, while Captain Kennedy is another round of acoustic picking in the vein of The Old Homestead, if significantly shorter. It was held over from the unreleased Chrome Dreams album.

It would have been great if he stopped there but oh no he didn’t. He recorded 5 desperately gung-ho cheesey country-rock tracks with a full band. These tracks have very little to recommend themselves, either musically nor lyrically. Stayin’ Power is like a countrified version of the hoary old Phil Phillips track Sea of Love. No amount of fiddle and steel guitar can rescue these trite songs. If these songs were my introduction to Neil Young, I’d be DNA testing them. He might have been trying to go for a Comes A Time style feel, but it didn’t work. The title track is a cheery stomp-along country rocker which is even worse than that sounds, especially with a chorus of “USA, USA”.

It feels unfinished at just under half an hour. And I could have done without the last 13 minutes. Pity he didn’t scrap this album and hang onto the first 4 tracks a bit longer.

Album Review: LCD Soundsystem – This Is Happening

In these days of 13 or 14 track albums it’s a relief to see that 2010’s LCD Soundsystem has only 9 tracks, albeit lengthy ones. So how would James Murphy follow up Sound of Silver?

Well he hasn’t done anything too different in the main, though opening track Dance Yrself Clean is a brave opener. The instrumentation is very muted for the first 2 or 3 minutes till it mutates into an electro dance track. I would say interesting rather than hugely successful.

Drunk Girls has a whiff of David Bowie off it, as do several tracks on this album. In this case it’s Boys Keep Swinging. It’s a little repetitive and juvenile, just like the Bowie song! This track though is a real case of spot the influence, with Velvet Underground’s White Light White Heat very pervasive, along with a little Talking Heads and Blur thrown in.

One Touch is more of a dancefloor type track, though very 2010 sounding, until the Bowie influence returns on All I Want, which takes the same treated electric guitar from Heroes and channels it through the song. I Can Change is a hedonistic sounding dance song, a real electro stomper with hints of Kraftwerk, and it’s bloody marvellous.

Murphy’s lyrics are often worth listening to, and this album is no different, notably on the Japan-influenced You Wanted A Hit (“you wanted a hit - but maybe we don’t do hits”). After Pow Pow, akin to Watch The Tapes from his last album, Somebody’s Calling Me takes the Bowie theme and gives it a twist, this track dragging itself along in the exact same manner as Iggy Pop’s Bowie-produced Nightclubbing. He finishes off back on home ground with the typically LCD sounding Home.

Bored with all the references? Despite all the similarities to other artists, the album is actually really enjoyable. James Murphy has said this would be his last album as LCD Soundsystem and if so, he exits proudly through the front door.