Nick Lowe

Wholly remade as the gentlemanly crooner, At My Age has all the sly character of Lowe's other late-career musts, but this relatively up-tempo set is a bit brassier, allowing him to deliver sinister tunes like "People Change" and "I Trained Her To Love Me" with a spry, hard-swinging spring in his step. Long in his own class of dapper songwriting, nothing here disappoints, and "Long Limbed Girl" and "Not Too Long Ago" are immaculate.

On his first record in six years, this proto-punk icon keeps it terrifically mellow without
getting mushy in the head. Lowe sticks mostly to roughly crooned ballads and vaguely
Sixties-sounding rock, the best of which reveal a fighting spirit under their catchy
exterior: Witness "I Trained Her to Love Me," a funny, nasty jab at an ex in which Lowe
plays an aging ass man in the tradition of Frank and Dino.