Lloyd Cole The Negatives (March)
This spring, releases and tours by the two songwriters crisscross at interesting junctures. While the ex-Pavement leader is taking a star turn on his eponymously titled solo debut, using a portrait of his sun-kissed face and overgrown hairdo as cover art and his girlfriend as a percussionist, Cole has assembled his first credited band since the Commotions. He uses the lyrics on The Negatives to reflect on the 90s, and specifically on the era of his own eponymously titled debut, during which he grew a greasy sheet of hair, posed for an Amaretto print ad, and, in his words, “tried to rock” a la his teen heroes, David Bowie and T. Rex’s Marc Bolan. To launch his solo career, he moved from London to New York, recruited Lou Reed’s Blue Mask-era sidemen, guitarist Robert Quine and drummer-producer Fred Maher, penned songs like the mean-streets-stalking “Downtown,” dedicated his nights to hard drinking, chain-smoking, and womanizing, and, judging by period photos, avoided bathing.
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It makes you wonder if Cole could offer Malkmus a little advice–and whether Malkmus would take it. Judging by his solo debut, Malkmus won’t be shortening his trademark ironic distance any time soon. But while he’s no less oblique as a solo entity than he was in Pavement, the singer has scrawled some of his catchiest and cleverest songs for the album: On “The Hook” he sketches a tall tale of life on the high seas, then pirates a solo from the Stones’ “Tumbling Dice”; and on “Jenny & the Ess-Dog,” he constructs perversely memorable internal rhymes like “She’s 18, he’s 31 / She’s a rich girl / He’s the son”–wait for it–“of a Coca-Cola middleman.” Like Cole, he has a way with a lilting melody that can lodge even the most throwaway line in your brain.
