Lloyd Cole - Music for broken hearts

A cult crooner, a supremely fine pop writer, but also a standard-bearer for unfulfilled promise, Lloyd Cole was, for anyone who was a teenager with a passion for indie music in the Eighties, an influential and defining figure. His career, after the successful saga alongside The Commotions, continued with a long series of solo efforts that perhaps never again reached the artistic and commercial heights of his early masterpieces, but which always revealed their author's intelligence – and, at times, as with his collaboration with Roedelius, even a fearless curiosity. Having failed to break into the mainstream to which he himself had dedicated an album in 1987, the Derbyshire-born artist could nonetheless always count on the underground devotion of a small but utterly loyal band of fans.

In the Coils of the Rattlesnakes

With a sulky Elvis-like face, quiff included, and the charm of a misunderstood man of letters, Lloyd Cole is a son of the English provinces: born in Buxton, Derbyshire, on 31 January 1961, but it was in Glasgow, where he attended university as a Philosophy student, that his life would take a decisive turn, as he met his future artistic companions, aka The Commotions: Neil Clark (guitar), Lawrence Donegan (bass), Blair Cowan (keyboards) and Stephen Irvine (drums). The band formed in 1982, and it would take two years before their debut album arrived. The project, however, was already clear: Cole wanted to bid farewell to new wave and turn instead towards a distinctive acoustic folk sound, drawing on the roaring Sixties (Byrds and Velvet Underground) and decadent pop-rock (the melodic ballads of David Bowie and Marc Bolan). It was an operation that anticipated the prevailing mood in Britain in the second half of the Eighties and effectively summed up the whole formidable British “jangle pop” scene of bands like Prefab Sprout, Aztec Camera, Deacon Blue and many others.

Rattlesnakes (1984) is through and through the fruit of his talent, materialising in sophisticated melodies, literary references in the lyrics (from Simone de Beauvoir to Norman Mailer), anguished vocal performances, but also in his dandy-ish manner, somewhere between Bryan Ferry and Morrissey, albeit with a touch of wholesome provincial rusticity. Although not especially gifted from a technical standpoint, Cole displays a remarkable level of interpretive invention, with an atypical crooning style and a nonchalance reminiscent of Reed. His stories recount episodes of lived experience, romantic encounters transposed onto the plane of memory, with impressionistic brushstrokes, amid pervasive melancholy and an ironic streak that borders on satire.

Opening the tracklist is the immortal arpeggio of the single “Perfect Skin”, a disguised sample of residual new wave, with desolate, melancholy atmospheres. Despite its essentially folk-rock foundation, the whole thing is pervaded by a glossy, decadent iciness that recalls the translucent surface of Bowie's “Be My Wife”. Clark's jangle guitars play fluid, rapid chords with effortless agility, in a clean, chiming tone, while the lyrics read almost like the autobiography of a promising academic overwhelmed by the disjointed experiences of youth. The second single is no less impressive: the gorgeous “Forest Fire”, with its soft, soft-rock tones barely warmed up by Clark's fine closing electric guitar solo, frames one of the sublime melodies chiselled by Cole's pen, whose touch proves both delicate and intense at once.

Two other knockout blows, placed third in the running order and closing out side two respectively, also helped determine the album's success. The first is the compelling title track, one of the band's absolute masterpieces, co-written by Cole and Clark. There isn't a single superfluous note; the melody is tight, the product of a flash of inspiration. The whole thing is accompanied by lush orchestration that blossoms into a brisk minuet during the bridge, while the lyrics, inspired by Joan Didion's novel “Play It as It Lays”, immortalise yet another female character turned into a universal archetype, alluding to the heroine of the film “On The Waterfront” (“She looks like Eve Marie Saint in On The Waterfront”).

The other track mentioned earlier is “Are You Ready To Be Heartbroken?”, a perfect title for a romantic slogan that would forever accompany Cole's career arc. The female backing vocals in the background echo a Ferry-esque romanticism, and Cole's own delivery brushes up against the aching sighs of the former Roxy Music frontman. The acoustic guitars soar into a thrillingly accelerated chord progression. The song is soft, sweet, ethereal, yet the guitars run wild, to disorienting effect.

Cole proves himself a master at hopping from one genre to another, all while maintaining a rigorous underlying coherence. Each song thus becomes a small essay in musical metamorphosis. Take "Down On Mission Street", which opens with low tones and long, deep notes, only to blossom into the playful childishness of the chorus, while the insistent pizzicato and the strings lurking in the background allusively evoke Eastern atmospheres. Or "Speedboat", born as a skeletal, cutting blues number that unexpectedly melts into a sweet, dreamlike chorus that seems lifted straight from the finest work of the Smiths, the other band that buried punk under a wave of sixties strumming. Jangle-pop remains the canvas, but the colors can take on French inflections (the twilit accordion waltz of "Charlotte Street", another melodic feat with another memorable female figure), breezy folk'n'roll gaits ("Four Flights Up", with its energetic rush of guitars backed by delicate synths), easy-listening orchestrations (the pop vignette of "Patience", lovable even in its kitschy opening backing vocals and its glossy, era-defining arrangements), and bucolic, Beatles-esque atmospheres, as on "2cv", a sort of Cole-style "Blackbird", with a guitar-chord interplay that gives the impression the chords are at times moving "backwards", and lyrics that reckon with the disillusionment of a disappointed romantic hope, in the heart of a sweltering London summer.

Rattlesnakes receives a rather mixed reception: its climb up the UK chart stalls at No. 13, though the album will go on to sell over 100,000 copies, earning it a gold disc. The most significant acclaim, however, comes from critics and peers: the influential music magazine NME will even place it on its list of the 100 greatest albums of all time. Nor will tributes from other artists be lacking, among them the Manic Street Preachers, who will count it among their ten favourite albums ever, and Tori Amos, who will pay it a notable tribute with her cover of "Rattlesnakes". It is undoubtedly one of the albums that fully captures the spirit of those years, suspended between the twilight of the wave era and the explosion of the new (indie) pop.

Ten Easy Pieces

For the second act, Easy Pieces (1985), inspired precisely by Bob Rafelson's film "Five Easy Pieces", Cole further smooths out the surface of his sound, amid violins, brass and glossy keyboards, but the melodies start to grow a bit paler, and at times one suspects the English artist is improvising his verses over simple chord progressions, with his gift for choruses saving the day more than once (see for instance "Rich" and "Grace"). The exception is a little gem called "Cut Me Down", with its restrained emotional surge and a perfect chorus, in line with the British pop of the second half of that same decade (not long after, for instance, came Deacon Blue's "Dignity").

Generally speaking, though, Cole seems more at ease when he clings back to his folk roots, livening up the songs with rather inspired touches, as happens on "Pretty Gone", or better still on "Her Last Fling".

Even the vocal performances lose a bit of their bite. Whereas on Rattlesnakes Cole had experimented with various modes of expression, here he settles on one and keeps it constant throughout the album: that croaky, strangled voice which, while it has become a defining and distinctive trait, can also grow wearisome over the long haul.

Besides pop, Easy Pieces also opens up to soul, though in the England of those years the two were not so far apart. This is clear right from the opening track, "Rich", with brass that recalls a bit of Reed's "Berlin" ("Oh Jim", "How Do You Think It Feels"), even if faint Smiths-like touches survive in the fine chorus. Another spot-on refrain comes with "Pretty Gone", which in its closing section brings back the soul brass of "Rich". "Grace" is probably one of the best tracks here: the accordions and the hazy, melancholic Parisian atmospheres of "Charlotte Street" return, but the melody and rhythm are more urgent; the chorus also works well, landing as an unexpected moment of reflection, tinged with darkness. "Lost Weekend" is almost a "folk" version of Iggy Pop's "The Passenger", but its drive is quickly offset by the kind of static "Are You Ready To Be Heartbroken?" that is "James".

And while the melancholic, sugary pop of "Perfect Blue" can still, with a degree of leniency, be forgiven as an emblematic episode of its era, "Brand New Friend" truly overdoes the preciousness, with its rhythmic pulse built on synthetic dance arrangements and affected backing vocals, in line with that "UK-made pop-soul" which was exploding at the time, spearheaded by Simply Red.

Some versions of the album include tracks originally released as B-sides. Chief among them is "Her Last Fling", with the illusory harmonic and emotional crescendo of its magnificent organ keyboards layered over nimble, rhythmic acoustic guitars: its absence from the tracklist is baffling, though it will later resurface on the future "Best of". Worth noting too is "Minor Character", whose harmonic, melodic and instrumental flow comes close to echoing beat music, while "Big World" feels rather more superfluous, with its rock quotations hovering between Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry.

Unlike its historic predecessor, Easy Pieces will manage to enter the UK chart directly at No. 5. But perhaps there's more to it than that: a year on, the times were already riper for a better reception of the band's musical output, in an England that had by then moved beyond certain synth-wave conventions and was looking ahead to new sounds.

A Dive Into the Mainstream

Despite its commercial success, however, Easy Pieces fails to satisfy the band. Lloyd Cole will admit that this second effort had "lost the freshness of the debut, without replacing it with anything else", while Donegan will go so far as to call it "terrible". The fact remains that the following Mainstream (1987) marks a partial change of course.

In certain respects, with this record the band genuinely attempts to break into the musical and commercial "mainstream". And that means, first and foremost, finally stepping into the spotlight, with a touch more star quality. Cole the dandy, from the heights of his intellectual haughtiness, had remained ostentatiously "in the shadows" in the artwork of previous records. Now, instead, he moves on to auteur-style chiaroscuro: photographer Alastair Thain rushes in to capture Cole and his bandmates one after another in a series of glossy close-ups to adorn the album's booklet. And musically speaking, why not finally turn, like everyone else, to the best production money can buy? The new venture proves not so easy, though, and after a first attempt with Stewart Copeland of the Police, the final choice falls on Ian Stanley, one of the two hidden members of Tears For Fears and a defector from the band following the glories of "Songs From The Big Chair" (an album whose global success had, in fact, aptly defined the mainstream of the Eighties).

The operation ultimately succeeds, at least in part, since the leap forward in production is indeed noticeable, and the album returns the band to the UK Top 10 of best-selling albums. And while the songwriting genius may seem a touch faded, there's always the well-worn safety net of craft to fall back on. As in the effective opener, entrusted to "My Bag": a thoroughly successful specimen of white funk that would put to shame all those who have "tried", see the likes of Curiosity Killed The Cat and company. It's a driving opener that stands as a credible successor to "Perfect Skin", with a fine pulsing bass in the background and a convincing injection of ringing guitars in the chorus. Cole again plays with fire where pop is concerned ("From The Hip" and "Hey Rusty"), but fortunately this time in less cloying fashion, and he fares particularly well with "29" (no denying it: the man had a knack for choruses), stylistically rather hard to pin down and among the record's most interesting moments.

When we get to the title track, we realize it's actually one of the least "mainstream" elements of the whole record, with its hushed, barely whispered folk (though it boasts a sumptuous yet restrained closing guitar passage that acts as a sounding board amplifying the minimal sound of the rest of the song). Also persuasive, despite its conventional setup, is "Mister Malcontent", particularly in its ending, which has the vocal and instrumental monumentality of Simple Minds and the Bowie-esque guitars of "Look Back In Anger".

Cole, above all, still knows how to paint memorable melodies, as in the graceful ballad "Jennifer She Said", for guitars, strings and (hushed) keyboards; yet another pop gem and the album's masterpiece, complete with "Morrissey-esque" echoes in the variation that follows the chorus. A special mention goes to "Big Snake", the work of a Cole grappling with his own emotional morbidness, who for the only time on the album hands over the songwriting credit to producer Ian Stanley. Thanks to him, this track recovers something still missing from the British landscape of those years: the hushed, nocturnal jazz of Sade. Particularly splendid is the brief strangled trumpet interlude that wounds the song so painfully.

Then there's the curiosity of "Sean Penn Blues": perhaps the first tribute, truth be told not a particularly flattering one, to the man who, at that time, far from the two Oscars he'd later win and from becoming one of Hollywood's top names, was still nothing more than "Mister Madonna", as Cole himself calls him. The ending of "These Days" is ambiguous (nothing to do with the Joy Division song of the same name), marked by the contrast between the nursery-rhyme verses resting on harpsichord and the sudden darkening of the chorus, pained and crepuscular.

The story of the glorious firm Lloyd Cole And The Commotions essentially ends here, but not that of its "owner". It was only natural for the (almost) "one-man band" of the group to drop the "and" and everything that followed it, embarking on a long solo career (at least formally, since in truth he would still be joined by Clark and Cowan on several occasions). As is customary, the closing credits would include the inevitable release of a "Best of" (1984-1989) and an unmissable reunion many years later, in 2004, to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the release of Rattlesnakes.

Englishman in New York

The official fall of the conjunction "and" is sealed by the release of the first solo album in 1990, fittingly, almost proudly, titled Lloyd Cole, a title that restates his intention to take charge of his own career, while also signalling a substantial continuity. What we witness over the course of his long solo career, however, is the development of an increasingly intimate Cole, both as a writer and as a performer. Curiously, it would be Swedish audiences above all who embraced his work, repeatedly rewarding him with a place in the top ten best-selling albums.

Having relocated to New York and assembled an exceptional team made up of Robert Quine on guitar, already a veteran of Richard Hell's Voidoids, as well as Fred Maher (ex-Material) on drums, and Matthew Sweet, future power-pop star, on bass, Lloyd Cole reinvents himself in the refined guise of a decadent post-wave songwriter, proving he could have a future even without his longtime backing band.

It's Quine's simmering guitar tension that drives tracks like the anguished "Don't Look Back" and the vibrant "No Blue Skies"; while Cole's more melancholic and desolate streak resurfaces on top-class ballads such as "Undressed" - where he slips into the role of erotic narrator - and "To The Church", where his typically British biting wit also resurfaces.

Overall, a harder, more direct sound dominates compared to the Commotions era, reflected in hidden homages to beloved glam-rockers like Bolan ("Sweetheart") and in sharper, more direct performances. Cole bluntly invites his lover to "find somebody else's body and tear the stars from the sky" ("No Blue Skies") and reels off new murky love affairs ("Ice Cream Girl", "Loveless"), without giving up his contrite existential musings ("Don't Look Back").

Lloyd Cole, in short, effectively marks the start of a second life for the Derbyshire crooner, particularly energized by his new American adventure and by the musical influences it brought with it.

The second solo effort, Don't Get Weird On Me Baby from 1991, is an album split into two parts (and in a sense three). The first, the better of the two, plays out like a concert for "whispers and orchestra" by an author who bares his heart modestly and intimately. An author who, truth be told, hasn't lost his taste for pop, but who, letting his emotions run free without wearing any mask, never gives in to cloying seduction. This first part opens delightfully with "Butterfly", rich with melodramatic orchestration that creates the effect of a John Barry film score. Bristol's trip-hop was already knocking at the door, but "Butterfly" is instead a perfect example of pop music. Its tone, sustained as it is, soon softens into the lightness of "There For Her", where the inevitable strings are overlaid with a harmonica, in a most unusual pairing. Then comes a reworked Burt Bacharach in "Margo's Waltz", while "Half Of Everything" picks up the more tense tones of "Butterfly" and gives us Cole the performer at his best. Closing the circle are the velvety "Man Enough", reminiscent of Steely Dan, and "What He Doesn't Know", little more than a whisper, with that endlessly repeated guitar chord that makes it something of a Cole-style "House Of Cards" by Radiohead.

In terms of melodic instinct and economy, the first part could have stood alone as one of the happiest episodes in Cole's solo output. But then "Tell Your Sister" arrives to abruptly break with everything heard so far, ushering in the second part with an energy poised between "My Bag", recorded with his old bandmates, and the Simple Minds of "Once Upon A Time" (even in the vocals, which echo Kerr's style). This rock interlude continues with "Weeping Wine" and "To The Lions", while what amounts to an ideal third part of the record, a kind of stylistic fusion of the first two, consists of the final three tracks and closes with a striking finale that elsewhere would have been the opening track: "She's A Girl And I Am A Man"; what song could better embody the quintessence of Anglo-Saxon easy listening than this one?

Negative Vibrations

The following Bad Vibes is, on the whole, more solidly anchored to guitars and rock form than its predecessor, and boasts a fine opener in "Morning Is Broken", a pun on Cat Stevens's "Morning Has Broken": a pop song with sumptuous guitars that brings to mind the Silencers of the "Letters From St. Paul" era. The following "So You'd Like To Save The World" is an unclassifiable, ironic song, with distorted, Hawaiian-flavoured guitars and improbable choral asides. All told, this solo Cole seems less studied, and therefore truer, than the Cole of the last albums with his historic band. The tracks that follow do indeed speak their mind honestly and sincerely, from "Holier Than You" to "Love You So What".

Even the whispered blues interlude of "Wild Mushrooms" doesn't sound as predictable as it might risk being, while "My Way To You" gives us a British musician firmly under American influence, and "Too Much Of A Good Thing" slips back into fluid, Deacon Blue-style pop. But the happiest pop moment (if we really want to label it that way) is "Mister Wrong", refined and just catchy enough. Also good is the hiccupping rock of "Fall Together", almost a nod to the similarly-titled, far more famous Beatles song "Come Together".

Bad Vibes, overall, wouldn't break through, stalling at No. 38 on the UK chart (though not in unpredictable Sweden, where it would climb all the way to No. 8).

The opening of Love Story, his fourth solo album, released in 1995, immediately reveals yet another shift in taste, this time toward acoustic guitars, which in some ways take us back to the Rattlesnakes era. The ambiguous chorus of the opening track "Trigger Happy" comes off well, almost like a rereading of the old "2cv". Also interesting is "I Didn't Know That You Cared", with its sweeping, airy background orchestration. The music-box tinkle of "Baby" anticipates, in its own way, Radiohead's "No Surprises" by two years, while "Unhappy Song" - closer in spirit to "Are You Ready To Be Heartbroken" than to "2cv" - is a folk ballad about the passing of the months.

We're still fond of the jagged acoustic chords of "Let's Get Lost", which also display, as a careful listen will reveal, a certain vocal virtuosity - unshowy yet present - in the pursuit of a harmony that's deliberately off-key in the verses.

In 1997-1998 Cole formed Negatives with a handful of young New York musicians (Jill Sobule, Dave Derby, Mike Kotch, Rafa Maciejak). The result of this union is the self-titled album released in 2000.

Despite the American input, this is still a decidedly British album, one that doesn't stray from Cole's now-familiar intimate solo style. At the same time, the addition of new forces doesn't seem to benefit the compositional level of the work much: overall there's a certain melodic flatness and a scarcity of ideas in the writing and crafting of the songs. The impression is that the intimism tends to dissolve too much into bittersweetness. Still, there are a few small jolts, like the adrenaline-fueled "Tried To Rock", which harks back to certain sounds from his solo debut, raising the pulse with some fine urban rock, or the melodious "What's Wrong With This Picture", which snaps new emotional snapshots over bright guitar chords (“’Smile’, she said, and if you want/ I’ll look the other way/ Until you regain your melancholy disposition/ Or until you get over yourself”).

Content in his new solo, New York dimension, at 40 Cole allows himself the luxury of quoting himself, with the opening "Past Imperfect", which scatters references to the old "Brand New Friend" and "Lost Weekend".

Electronic Seeds

Having set aside the Negatives experience, Cole returns to his solo guise with Plastic Wood (1995), released six years after the previous Love Story, and pulls off a completely unexpected move. It's an entirely instrumental album, made up of sprawling electro-ambient atmospheres.

Cole had never strayed from the song form, nor had he ever shown such a marked interest in electronic sounds, always preferring instead, with his usual shrewd instinct, to pursue thoroughly tried-and-tested models (chiefly pop, rock, soul and folk). In some ways, though, his taste for minimalism - typical of his solo output - still persists, and the end result sounds evocative and stimulating.

The tracks where he takes the biggest risks are the closing ones: the hypnotic trance of "Park West", the anguished quasi-industrial of "Post Script", and the jungle-flavored reworking of Kraftwerk's "Trans-Europe Express" in "Machinist", by Kraftwerk.

That same year also saw the release of an outtakes compilation, Etc, but here we find the Cole we know, this time working through a series of acoustic singer-songwriter ballads. A Cole who, in his layering of guitars and accordion, looks straight to the master Bob Dylan.

The new millennium opens with another solo work, Music In A Foreign Language (2003). The opener, the melancholic title track, stands out both melodically and in terms of performance as one of the finest moments of Cole's post-Commotions career. The following "My Other Life" is also excellent, achieving a perfect climax of tension and delicacy, with that aching, Nick Cave-esque piano. And it's from the Melbourne bard himself that Cole borrows "People Ain't No Good", for an intense, heartfelt cover.

Unfortunately, though, the rest of the album doesn't hold to these standards, settling into an all-too-familiar sound, despite the undeniable class of the minimal arrangements, steeped in melancholy, where the voice-and-acoustic-guitar setup is joined by the occasional sparse keyboard and a light bed of percussion.

Lloyd Cole is no longer the cultured young artist with the beguiling voice and ironic gaze who wrote timeless masterpieces like "Forest Fire", "Perfect Skin" and "Jennifer, She Said". He's lost his way. From time to time he's resurfaced, only to drift off again into a musical output that, for today's listeners, no longer carries the charm and appeal it once had. Though his class, at times, still manages to shine through.

"Hey Lloyd I'm Ready To Be Heartbroken"

In the meantime, though, new and heartfelt tributes have come the Buxton dandy's way. Like the one from one of the finest indie-pop bands around, Camera Obscura, who titled one of their singles "Hey Lloyd I'm Ready To Be Heartbroken", in answer to the famous "Are You Ready To Be Heartbroken?", recorded way back in 1985. Cole takes it in stride and carries on undeterred, well aware of being one of the great forerunners of the new "bedroom" pop, with the stubbornness of someone no longer willing to compromise.

Perhaps hiding a sarcastic reflection on his own career within its title, Antidepressant (2006) delivers eleven tracks of light, introspective rock, mostly marked by a melancholy, brooding streak.

The sounds permeating the record are clearly pop in nature, defined by a fairly conventional, mainstream production and arrangements, enriched by orchestration that's very much present yet discreet and never too intrusive. A few tracks are more upbeat and sun-drenched, but the mood of the album is dictated by stretched-out, hazy tempos, slide guitars, harmonica, brushed drums, and all the instrumentation you'd expect from an album of refined pop-rock songs heavily tinged with folk and country. The overall effect suggests a mix of sad, melancholy moments and brighter, happier ones. But, to put it in Lloyd's own words, "an antidepressant is a pill you take that makes you feel good, but taking it implies the existence of depression."

The taste for lyrical-surreal character sketches that had borne such exceptional fruit on Rattlesnakes returns here. Hence "The Young Idealist", whose relaxed gait takes us back to the philosophical-academic scenarios of the debut album, recounting ordinary tales of shattered dreams and renewed cynicism through elegant wordplay and unexpected cultural references, without ever tipping over into pessimism and despair. The breezy, Beatles-esque "Woman In A Bar", on the other hand, harks back to the fantastic female figures described in that era, marking one of the album's brightest moments, alongside "New York City Sunshine" and the title track, episodes in which Cole's lyrics turn more ironic and less sarcastic, and the accompaniment also becomes more rhythmic and full-bodied, with the addition of keyboards and strings.

In tracks like "I Didn't See It Coming", Cole pokes fun at his own inability to make the right move, while on the intimate "How Wrong Can You Be?" a refined acoustic guitar introduces a ballad of classic folk-rock stamp, telling yet another tale of a relationship gone wrong.

It's the album's closing stretch, though, after a few less successful tracks, that delivers the collection's true gems: first and foremost "Travelling Light", a ballad "in the style of the Commotions", whose measured gait sees pop happily marry country. And, to close things out, "Rolodex Incident", which, after a melancholy roughly two-minute instrumental passage, brings Lloyd back, with his unmistakable voice, in the guise of the chronicler of "broken hearts", painting a picture of lost loves and regrets.

The faint signs of recovery shown on Antidepressant, however, fizzle out four years later on Broken Record (nomen omen, alas...), a decidedly flat and flavorless effort.

After the quadruple collection of B-sides and rarities released in 2009, Cleaning Out The Ashtrays, padded out that same year by the release of a couple of live albums recorded in Dublin and Bremen, Cole decided to stir things up a bit by putting out a record that, in the end, is remembered almost solely for its illustrious collaborations: these range from Joan As Police Woman, to old friends Fred Maher and Dave Derby (already alongside Cole in the Negatives), to ex-Commotions man Blair Cowan.

The English songwriter, who has long been permanently settled in the United States, much like an Elvis Costello reworked in light of a quiet, gentlemanly understatement befitting an intellectual in exile, seems to have found his own stylistic balance in the clean, linear diction of a middle-of-the-road, almost too confiding folk-pop, stuffed with mildly American stereotypes bordering on the palest mannerist tweeness, which leave one puzzled. What's sorely lacking, above all, are solid songs in which one can still trace the faint shadow of that refined, cultured, sensitive generational crooner of the Eighties, poised between Morrissey, Scott Walker, Roy Orbison and Burt Bacharach.

Broken Record offers the mildly nostalgic, crepuscular penmanship of small, creased country-folk postcards, dominated by the faded half-tones of a predictable compositional vein, which dilutes its own senile weakening into the controlled, gentle tone of small musical truisms. What's redeemed are a few modest tracks like "Oh Geneviève", "Double Happiness", "Writers Retreat" or "That's All Right", in which, like a fleeting flash, some vital spark of that small but great English indie-pop performer still shines through.

In 2013 Cole tries again. This time, though, the decisive spur to attempt a comeback has a first and last name: Bob Dylan, and a specific point of reference in the album "Tempest", which the former Commotions frontman greeted with enthusiasm.

Following Dylan's example, the English songwriter does an about-face, reclaiming his more glorious past and unleashing on Standards (2013) a handful of Reed-esque electric rave-ups with which he's evidently far more at ease than with the nostalgic folksinger guise that had weakened his most recent output. It's no coincidence that Reed's name is the first to come to mind here, where the usual understatement of the lyrics moves within a sonic context indebted to that New York which was indeed the place where Cole's solo career began, but above all the musical kingdom of the former Velvet Underground man, so much so that even more decisive today is the presence behind the drums of trusty Maher, who, incidentally, produced Mr. Reed's own "New York". Alongside him, among the guests are now well-established travelling companions such as "policewoman" Joan Wasser and ex-Commotions keyboardist Blair Cowan, while Lloyd's guitar is answered by that of his son, Will. On this basis, a veritable showcase of quotation and homage is set up, though the revisiting of certain "standards" is rendered less slavish thanks to a Cole who has returned in fine form as a melodist.

Kicking things off is "California Earthquakes", a John Hartford cover that feels like a rite of passage from the rightful owner's country-folk to the rough-and-ready rock'n'roll in which it's here immersed. Things get even better with "Women's Studies", the first self-penned track of the bunch, on whose jagged riffs lyrical irony ("To complete my education I had to wake up in your bathtub") and instantly gripping melodic inspiration stand in perfect balance. Almost the entire album, in any case, is a continuous string of contagious hooks and incisive, intimate digressions, further bolstered by Cole's crooning, capable of evoking now the languor of Chris Isaak ("Blue Like Mars"), now the latent nervousness of Elvis Costello ("Period Peace"). Given the sense of lightness instilled by the intellectual detachment of the lyrics, the uptempo tracks land more obliquely than as punches to the face, while the ballads return to old alt-country seductions, carving out a notable role as moments of reflection (the Tweedy-esque "Myrtle And Rose" and "No Truck", resting on guitar minimalism of great depth).

Among the few lulls, worth noting is "Opposite Days", which, with its call-and-response riffs, ends up becoming an all-too-nostalgic requiem for the golden years of CBGB. It's a fairly minor aside, though, in a journey that proceeds smoothly all the way to the decisive closing one-two punch in which all of 2013's Cole is condensed, between sophisti-pop melodies of crystalline purity ("Kids Today") and tributes honourably paid to the American hinterland ("Diminished Ex", of clear Whiskeytown lineage, but with an almost three-dimensional solidity in the guitar overdubs that's impossible to ignore).

A Cluster Gone Mad

Then, in 2013, comes the collaboration you'd never expect.

Lloyd Cole has always been a fan of Cluster, particularly their 1976 album “Sowiesoso”, and the electronic hues of his 2001 Plastic Wood bore more than a trace of that predilection. That very record had struck a chord with Roedelius, who co-founded Cluster alongside Dieter Moebius, to the point that the German composer expressed a wish to work with Cole on a joint project. That goal was actually pursued starting in 2011, when the two finally met in Vienna, laying the groundwork for the co-credited album that would arrive two years later.

Selected Studies Vol.1 (2013) reveals mature music, composed with meticulous care, in which the electronic textures nonetheless condense into simple, direct episodes. Cole doesn't sing or even play guitar, while Roedelius rarely touches the keys of his piano. The two musicians focus mainly on weaving subtle sonic scenarios, oscillating between relaxed, deeply evocative moments (“Virginie L”, “Lullerby” and “Still Life With Kannyu”), piano effects enriched by vigorous kraut-rock melodies and echoes of Satie and Debussy, and rhythmic surges propelled by lopsided Cluster-style keyboards (“Fehmarn F/O”), with occasional drifts toward noise (“Wandelbar”, “HIQS”).

A successful marriage, then, between British sophisti-pop and German electronic avant-garde, an experiment that may well remain a curious one-off in the British songwriter's career.

Nearly sixty, Cole returns with a coup de théâtre. Gathering in his attic flat in Massachusetts part of the glorious old troupe (Neil Clark on guitar and Blair Cowan on synths, that is 3/4 of the Commotions, who hadn't recorded together since 1987). The result is Guesswork (2019), a record of pure electronic synthesis. Sometimes slow and measured, sometimes more rhythmic, but always with the class and verve of his best days.

The opener “The Over Under” alone sweeps away the clouds and lights up the sky. Seven minutes of music set to poetry, ethereal, slowed down, an extremely effective melody that unwinds between sparse piano notes and distant ambient effects. A voice deeper, weighed down by the years, but all the more effective for it. The following “Night Sweats” shifts register somewhat. It's the most classically synth-pop episode of the bunch, the one that most fully embodies the tenets that made the movement famous: a minimal intro with single synth notes, a robotic base held up by drum machine and pulsing bass, and the classic synthetic riff that is the genre's true hallmark. A heartfelt vocal, almost accusatory, with “motherfucker” thrown around like it's raining. It softens only slightly in the chorus, before the fireworks of the finale.

Lighter but just as effective, and indeed far more fit to serve as a single, is “Violins”, a successful blend of solo Erlend Oye and the current Erasure. The whole record is a successful alternation of midtempo tracks and killer ballads, of synthetic strings and delicate piano passages, a crepuscular, melancholic atmosphere palpable in every groove. Exemplary in this sense is “Remains”, a gem of improbable, disarming sweetness and the album's undisputed high point. Elsewhere, the pace is sparer, more minimal, accompanied by glacial synthetic sounds and electronic percussion that round out the arrangement. What stands out is the consistently high quality of the songs, always well above par. Striking, for instance, is the chorus of “When I Came Down From The Mountain”, which opens into a melody heightened by synth carpets and surgical electric guitar interjections, sealing a sonic weave of enormous emotional impact. And it closes, not by coincidence, with nods entirely à-la Kraftwerk's “Autobhan” in the incipit of “Loudness War”.

On Pain (2023) is another aching collection of songs, this time laid over layers of synth textures, skillfully tempered by the contribution of two old partners in crime (ex-Commotions Blair Cowan and Neil Clark) and precious new acquaintances cultivated after his move to America, Dave Derby (Gramercy Arms) and Joan Wasser, while Chris Merrick Hughes's production ensures the right balance between sonic landscapes and lingering songwriterly touches.

The disarming power of the record is packed into the ample four minutes of “This Can’t Be Happening”: not only is Lloyd Cole's voice filtered through a vocoder, but the lyrics are condensed into just three lines: “Non puoi crederci/ Non può essere possibile/ Ma sta succedendo adesso”. A perfect synthesis of the cultured evolution of the Derbyshire crooner. Behind the scenes, one senses a certain devotion to a musician who once seemed far removed from Lloyd Cole's jangle-pop world, namely David Bowie, name-checked relentlessly in the excellent “The Idiot” (note the title, please), with particular reference to the Berlin period of the Thin White Duke (“Ci trasferiremo a Berlino/ Smetteremo di essere tossicodipendenti/ Pedaleremo e nuoteremo”).

Even the raw “Warm By The Fire” remains beholden to this new sonic language, perfectly set between the romantic, seductive title track and the apocalyptic electro-pop digression of “I Can Hear Everything”.

There will be no shortage of fans accusing the English musician of having betrayed the brilliant jangle-pop insights of his early days, but to be honest, these eight songs represent the rightful evolution of a songwriter who has chosen to grow and follow his own artistic instincts. A track like “You Are Here Now”, with its electronic, rock and even ambient-minimal tribulations, is the proper link between the present and the underrated final Commotions chapter, Mainstream, and despite its electronic guise, “More Of What You Are” has all the harmonic coordinates to be a lost track from the past. The closing track “Wolves” settles any doubt: elaborate and conceived with a layering of synths with a deceptively steady rhythmic pulse, it's an imaginative digression between dream-pop and futuristic field recording suggestions, in which kraut echoes and Brian Eno-like timbres intertwine, giving rise to a hypnotic groove rich in potential creative developments (not by chance, a remix set has already been planned, involving Barry Burns of Mogwai, Martyn Ware and Chris Hughes).

On Pain is a daring record, certainly a hard sell for old fans, but the funny thing is that never before has Lloyd Cole so fully captured the adventurous, innovative spirit of the era that brought him fame and success.

Enclosed within his accommodating microcosm of openly stated influences, the recent Lloyd Cole knows how to assert himself through a rediscovered communicative spontaneity and top-notch songwriting. A small digest of a career tackled with greater awareness of his own means compared to his most recent releases. But all in all, nothing has really changed: Lloyd still, simply, writes music for broken hearts, trying, with his ironic and moving ballads, to soothe that ever-open wound in the souls of yesterday's teenagers who, nevertheless, never managed or never wanted to grow up.

Contributions by Francesco Amoroso, Francesco Giordani, Andrea D’Addato, Mauro Caproni, Gianfranco Marmoro

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