Lloyd Cole

Superb guitar pop classic from the literate Englishman and his Scots band. Both Cole's songs and the Commotions' jangle-rich folk-rock guitar sound have an open, airy mid-1960s feel to them without being "retro" (touches of Dylan, Cohen and the VU abound). Rattlesnakes stands proud next to Aztec Camera's High Land, Hard Rain and the Smiths' debut.

In a previous life, Scottish singer/songwriter Lloyd Cole must have been a ventriloquist,
because in this life he's still having trouble finding his own voice. Too much of
Rattlesnakes, his debut album, sounds like Lou Reed, Tom Verlaine and Bob Dylan doing the
best of Lloyd Cole. Indeed, on entries like the spirited Dylanesque romp "Four Flights Up"
and the melancholy, Television-like "Charlotte Street," his battle to be heard ove... More >

A Glaswegian whose romanticism mixes the mundane and the pretentious in nice lyrical proportions, Cole is like a middle-class Roddy Frame escaped to university instead of the bohemian fringe. Born just before the Beatles made it respectable for college kids to like beat music, he claims student life as the rock and roll subject it so obviously is, and I say about time. So what if he can't stop talking about books and movies and gathers his material on day trips from his walkup flat? Does that make him so different from you? (Grade - B+)