At this too-late stage I'm fairly certain I chose the wrong two Lloyd Cole albums for this poll. I fear I was unduly influenced by the presence on each of a handful of my all-time favorite songs without due regard to how the albums stood as a whole. I don't think there'd be much argument that either Standards or The Negatives was a more coherent set than Antidepressant (#15) or this one at #10, Music In A Foreign Language.
Neither of those albums has anything to match the My Other Life, Late Night, Early Town, No More Love Songs or Today I'm Not So Sure from Music As A Foreign Language or the aforementioned and previously shared Rolodex Incident or The Young Idealists from Antidepressant, though.
Sod it! I guess I did choose the right albums after all!
Every Lloyd Cole album is someone's idea of his best work, of course, not to mention someone's favorite. Ever the self-promoter, Lloyd's never shy of quoting the more hyperbolic reviews on his website, although not for either of the two I've chosen. He does, however, add the rubric "My personal favourite" to Music In A Foreign Language.
I'm very happy to go along with that as least as far as his post-Commotions albums go. Much though I love just about everything he's ever done, I feel he's doomed to be one of those artists ever-defined by his debut. It's very, very hard to imagine anyone topping 1984's Rattlesnakes, a shoo-in for a place in my all-time Top Ten.
I should probably do that list some time. It'll have about twenty albums on it.
I don't really have a lot more to say about Lloyd Cole that I haven't said a bunch of times already. I'll just mention that this one's downbeat and depressed even by Lloyd's self-flagellating standards. It's also overflowing with quotable lines, provided the point your trying to illustrate is that the world is a cruel place and there's not much hope in it for any of us.
It's a message he's been carrying for thirty five years and more, now. I don't imagine he's likely to cheer up any time soon.
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