Love Story - 6222

Amazon.com No one begrudged Lloyd Cole for breaking up his great British pop band the Commotions and moving to New York to make American rock, although his subsequent solo records appeared to stray further and further from the facile songwriting that had early on made Cole so cherished. With this 1995 set, however, Cole settled back into doing what he does best, offering his best music since the Commotions' debut, Rattlesnakes, over a decade ago. Love Story returns to the colorful neobeat, English-major lyric style Cole developed as a young postgrad, though his writing is tempered now with the graceful maturity that graying hair, a marriage, and a child inevitably bring. Back are proper nouns, pop culture references, and clever quotes ("Penny walked in with that 'Love in Vain' look, said 'Every last man should be hanging from a meat hook'"), plus a subtle beauty in even his most basic lines ("She loves you best/And I love her nonetheless"). Restored as well are the tender accompaniments of acoustic guitar strums and tasteful lead lines, with a moody backdrop of light keys and strings. Like the smartest of love stories, the music is happy and sad, whimsical and doleful, never tired and often touching. --Roni Sarig From the Label "My goal this time was to sit down and write a quintessential Lloyd Cole record," explains Cole. "For the last five or six years, I've been seeing how many things I can try my hand at, things I don't normally do. Now I've come back to the attitude I started making records with -- and to what people might have liked about me in the first place." LOVE STORY is the kind of Lloyd Cole album that Cole hasn't made in a long while. Without sacrificing the emotional range of his more recent experimental work, he's returned to the inimitable qualities that first won a devoted audience for Cole and the Commotions' 1984 debut RATTLESNAKES: classic-pop songcraft and soaring melodies combined with the smart and perceptive lyrics he's been writing all along. Fans will also notice a more emotionally direct turn in Cole's songwriting. "The title LOVE STORY has no irony, and that's a new one for me," he laughs. "It's different from something like 'Perfect Skin,' which had so many layers in it." While the opening "Trigger Happy" wears its fatherly heart on its sleeve, the album's moods range from the wryness of "I Didn't Know You Cared," to the gorgeous melancholy of "Sentimental Fool," to the uncharacteristically carefree "Let's Get Lost" and the upbeat first single "Like Lovers Do."
ASIN: B0000009PV
VSKU: 56JPTK000YJO_ns
Condition: Good
Author/Artist:Cole, Lloyd
Binding: Audio CD