Lloyd Cole
Music In A Foreign Language

There are albums that, for one reason or another, stick with you and travel with you throughout your life, without anything or anyone ever being able to break the bond. And it doesn't matter if that album isn't universally recognized as a rock milestone. What's important is that it is for you. And then there are artists who captivate you, and you fall in love with them without really knowing why. You care for them regardless, and any move they make, even if not quite right, you end up loving just as you do with your partner.

"Rattlesnakes" in this case represents the album, and Lloyd Cole the artist.

Soon abandoned by the media, Lloyd Cole has stubbornly continued - since that distant 1984 year of "Rattlesnakes", his debut - to churn out quality albums, with very rare lapses of style, remaining tied to a lively, meditative, and intimate folk-pop with strong melodic appeals. In truth, even I, for a certain period, somewhat lost sight of him, whether due to the media oblivion in which he had (and has) plunged, or due to the aesthetic divergences that characterized certain musical years of mine, only to eventually return to the lost path and practically recover the entire discography of our artist.

"Music In A Foreign Language" arrived in 2003 (his ninth album in his career) and, in my opinion, stands well above the latest, albeit respectable, works of the Scotsman, crafting an introspective little portrait of folk-pop craftsmanship unjustly overlooked. Nine original tracks plus a single cover, Nick Cave's "People Ain't No Good," here rendered in a stripped-down and sober version, where King Ink's funereal pace is set aside for the use and enjoyment of its rightful author. A predominantly acoustic album, of fragile and ethereal structure consistently tinged with a subdued melancholy, designed to accompany broken hearts and disappointed loves, the unmistakable trademark of Lloyd Cole, just like his warm vocal timbre, even deeper and more intimate than at his beginnings.

Perhaps it's precisely his immobility, his digging vertically, that over time has relegated him to the back seat of the current music scene, when in truth much of the more exposed contemporary production could learn from him.

Music light years away from metropolitan chaos, from the frantic daily rhythms, from the ringing of cell phones, from the frenzy of the internet in every corner of the world. Music in a foreign language, as he himself suggests. Lloyd Cole has closed himself in a shell and continues to make albums for me and for those gentle souls who do not need yet another, often useless, novelty, but who sometimes curl up under a starry sky thinking that, maybe, tomorrow can also wait.