On Pain
TAPETE
8/10
IN the autumn of 1984, abetted by his Commotions, Lloyd Cole coughed out a masterpiece called Rattlesnakes. In his black polo neck and corduroys, the video to “Perfect Skin” saw Cole looking and sounding like a man willing middle-age gravitas to come and get him. Meanwhile, he fetishised the dreams and disasters of the protagonists in stories by Raymond Chandler and Joan Didion. On Easy Pieces, released a year later, he sang about characters who struggled to come to terms with the bad decisions of their ruthless youth.
All of which is worth dwelling on because, in the intervening years, Lloyd Cole finally got to be the thing he so badly came and went without much fanfare, 2013’s elicited not so much a Proustian rush as a Mexican wave of déja vû from returning fans who rightly held it up as a sonic postscript to that 1984 debut. As it turned out, was something of a red herring. Now that Cole had our attention, with 2019’s elegant, electronic he set about creating music that couldn’t be further removed from his precociously florid early work.
