An
English band which seemed very promising in
1984-
1985, when they released their first two
albums,
Rattlesnakes and
Easy Pieces. It's hard to think what
genre to lump them into; they were a
college radio band (so to speak), but they weren't "punk", they weren't synth-new-wave, and they weren't
the Smiths. Cole was always too
ironic, self-aware, and funny to be
Morrissey. They weren't
Echo and the Bunnymen either: They were
literate and they could play their instruments. They had hooky, overintellectual songs with clean
electric guitars and a keyboard player who leaned towards organ and piano. Their
bass player and
drummer were both cool, but they never quite seemed to be in the same band. The
bass had a fine
R&Bish sense of things but the
drums were somewhere else and it didn't
gel. This is only a minor complaint; they were cool, and the
arrangements were detailed and thoughtful. They used a
string section on a number of songs, which at the time seemed brave.
I think the closest thing to a "hit" they had (in the very limited mid-
1980s college radio sense of "hit") was "
Brand New Friend" from
Easy Pieces.
After the two
albums mentioned above, they slid badly.
Lloyd Cole is still
alive and well and living in NYC. He just released another less-than-earthshaking
solo album this year; I didn't notice whether or not he's still comparing every goddamn single one of the
neurotic women (TM) in his songs to
old movie actresses. Years ago, he
floated to the surface on whatever
Matthew Sweet record it was that
Richard Lloyd and
Robert Quine got exhumed on. But hey, Cole made two damn good records that don't sound dated fifteen years later, and that's a lot more than most of us will ever do.