Graham Coxon
The Golden D

There are few reviews of Graham Coxon, so I decided to review one of his albums not commented on this site: The Golden D. Graham Coxon, with his calm, nice-guy demeanor, delivers an incredibly rock album with punk nuances. These twelve songs can be everything for your ears: a great chorus, a jarring note, a rupture of your eardrum (this reminds us that perhaps in Song2, the guitar was played by him...).

Anyway... the album opens with "Jamie Thomas" which is nothing but two and a half minutes of pure chaos, where you can hardly hear Graham's voice, and yet you can't help but shout a sincere "wow" when you listen to it, also imagining how it could be live. "The Fear" is neither meat nor fish, meaning it doesn't make any particular impression, it's just a so-so rock piece. "Satan I Gatan" sounds like it's from a Mario Bros remix or, to be kinder, from one of the crazy-experimental ventures of the Radiohead. For "Fame and Fortune" the same goes as for "The Fear". "Lake" is the masterpiece of the album and is the most beautiful instrumental song Graham has ever done. It gives you the idea of a song by Explosions in the Sky, it seems post-rock, but it's just our bespectacled guitarist practicing the guitar and over 7 minutes and more, he raises the volume of the music higher and higher, extraordinary!!!
"Leave me alone" is an aggressive song that in the chorus recalls those hard-rock bands from the '80s. "Keep Hope Alive" seems to have come from a side of "Exit Music (for a film)" by Radiohead (mentioning them again), an acoustic ballad, suffocating with background noises that so much recall the tragedy in music written by Thom Yorke, then comes "Oochy Woochy" and you wonder if you've inadvertently changed CDs in your player, but no, it's still Graham, who with a precise loop of drums, winds and trumpets, embroiders for you, just like an old lady does crochet, a melody full of funk and fun (like the "fooling around" of Blur, see Lot105 or The Debt Collector) decidedly different from the air that prevails in this Golden D. "That's when I Reach for M Revolver" contains the best chorus of the album and remains a great rock song.
The last one, "Don't Think About Always" starts well and ends badly, a nice guitar melody gives way to filtered and deafening guitars that remind us of hard rock again! But Graham then takes the guitar away from the amplifier and pulls the plug: The Golden D is over!

This is definitely not a bad album, very good, but as I highlighted, it contains episodes that I think are too banal, useless, and burdensome for the album. A good 3/5 is deserved in my opinion.