The only Lloyd Cole song I thought I knew was Lost Weekend, which is on the next album, not this one. But I think I’ve heard Perfect Skin before – it's quite similar to Lost Weekend suggesting that Cole and friends established their sound early on.
Which is a kind of pleasant jangly pop/indie. Having come through The Byrds, George Harrison, REM, I felt sure that a 12-string Rickenbacker may have been involved somewhere in making this album, but there was nothing to specifically state this that I could find. A lot of the tracks have that kind of sound, though, for which I’m a sucker. That drummer Stephen Irvine is also credited with “tambourine”, a very Sixties sound, only adds to the comparisons to the Byrds.
Four Flights Up has a rockabilly beat, with a very Byrds-esque guitar (possibly Cole, possibly second guitarist Neil Clark) with some nice underlying organ from Blair Cowan. There’s a nice contemplative track 2CV which, like most of the tracks on this album, tend towards tales of young love and relationships – there's something very much “high quality student band” about both the sounds and subjects of the most of the tracks.
Which all makes for a slightly lightweight feeling album, but I don’t mean that in a bad way. Not every song can be Black Sabbath’s War Pigs or Peter Gabriel’s Biko; that would get very heavy very quickly. Sometimes you just need a song about a girl in a raincoat, like the first act of a Richard Curtis film.
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