Errrrr… OK, I’ll level with you, I didn’t really read the press release properly here.
As much as I like Lloyd Cole, I can’t claim to have been an avid follower of his career over the years. ‘Rattlesnakes‘, quite rightly, is often touted as one of the very best albums of the 1980s, and his 1991 release ‘Don’t Get Weird On Me, Babe‘ was sometimes uplifting, always dramatic and often broody. I even saw him perform an enjoyable intimate acoustic set at Leicester’s Y Theatre not THAT long ago, so I was expecting another set of exquisitely crafted, emotional, lyrically dense, captivating tunes straight from the author’s heart.
What I most definitely did NOT expect was for the man’s new album to sound something like Luke Abbott‘s ‘Holkham Drones‘, but with the beats taken out…
Back in 2011, Lloyd Cole and modern day composer Hans-Joachim Rodelius agreed to work on an album together. Cole was pretty much sick of the sight of computers and the way his life and music was being dictated by them. He needed a new instrument, he said. That instrument turned out to be a Eurorack modular synth, which he assembled himself in October of the same year. Much studying followed, the teachings of Allen Strange being a huge influence. Much of ‘1D‘ is what emerged from those sessions of quiet contemplation.
There is little point in mentioning the titles of any of the tracks herein, since they are, in essence, a collection of short incidental pieces that wouldn’t be out of place in a period history documentary. What’s interesting about them is how organic they sound. None of them, after all, were created with the use of any computers whatsoever.
You most definitely will not be swaggering down the street singing anything from ‘1D‘ at the top of your voice – they’re hardly earworms – but there is something quite beautiful in their sparsity. And hey, if you are a new parent to a baby who stubbornly refuses to sleep, I suspect this album could be your saviour.
[Rating:3]
