The Essential Albums of the Week
Lloyd Cole – “Broken Record”
(Tapete/Indigo, 17. September)
A small album for mankind a giant one for Lloyd Cole. Even before the first few bars of “The Flipside” or “Rhinestone” have faded you can’t help thinking just how mouldy these textbook compositions must seem to younger generations. Even the retrospective “The Negatives”, a mere 10 years old and as always released in the wrong place and at the wrong time, today seems like a strange message from another planet. Anyone who once loved Lloyd Cole, still loves him today the despondent voice, the unspectacular, the self-accusations simultaneously accusing himself and the entire world. It still seems astonishing that Cole is a golfer.
“Broken Record” is amongst his three, or four best albums ever. “Oh Genevieve” with its accordion and infectious melody, the grandiose and inscrutable “Man Overboard”: “The clown’s in the water/ The ship’s pulling out/ The circus won’t ever leave town.”
Marseille, Venice, Amsterdam or maybe Ballico Bay?
The dumb and false notion of a fair world in which Lloyd Cole (and any other commercially deprived artist) would rule the charts, seems out of place here. If the world was fair in this respect, an album like “Broken Record” would never have been made.
(8 out of 10) Jan Wigger
(0=complete disaster, 10=a true classic)
Link to original article online
Publication: Spiegel Online
Publication date: 14/09/2010