Lloyd Cole - On Pain (2023) [Official Digital Download]

Since his days as the leader of The Commotions and his still-mighty 1984 debut album, Rattlesnakes, Lloyd Cole has soldiered on, often swinging between conventional synth pop outings like 2013's Standards and more experimental electronic albums like 2015's 1D Electronics 2012-2014. Here, as on his last album, 2019's Guesswork, he mixes both: lots of synthesizers and digitally-generated sounds to go with familiar melodic paths and common rhythms. Former Commotions keyboardist Blair Cowan co-wrote three of the tracks and their guitar player Neil Clark co-wrote another.

Built mostly at his home studio in Western Massachusetts, On Pain—whose sound is typically gleaming with appreciable depth and range—was finished in the UK with producer Chris Hughes (Robert Plant, Tears for Fears, Def Leppard). As subjects go, the concentration of human frailties —occasionally specifically Cole's—is the ground over which his passionate, self-examining eye travels over again and again. In the repeated lines of "This Can't Be Happening" Cole concedes that all of what he senses is real and frustratingly unstoppable: "You can't believe it/ It can't be possible/ But it's happening now." In the title track, over a steady rhythm washed through synth waves, he offers that he can't be trusted with "money, secrets" nor "loving" but knows that "… you can trust me with your sorrow/ And oh, you can trust me with your pain/ And we will bury them deep down/ We'll never speak of them again." A trusty pop bounce drives "Warm by the Fire," where he harpoons Los Angeles, feeling appropriately alienated by its commercialism: "These are the cards I'm not holding/ This is the state I'm not in/ This is the role I'm not playing/ This is not who I am." More condemnation of Los Angeles, which is "so 1975," appears in "The Idiot" which floats along at an easy pace to synth chords and where the narrator pleads, "We'll move to Berlin/ Stop being drug addicts/ We'll cycle and swim." In the closer "The Wolves," the lens of disgust and worry widens, and over gently undulating synths Cole slowly sings, "You worship false idols/ You love the deceased/ You cower before tyrants/You spread the disease/You lack imagination."

TRACKLIST

01. Lloyd Cole - On Pain
02. Lloyd Cole - Warm By The Fire
03. Lloyd Cole - I Can Hear Everything
04. Lloyd Cole - The Idiot
05. Lloyd Cole - You Are Here Now
06. Lloyd Cole - This Can't Be Happening
07. Lloyd Cole - More Of What You Are
08. Lloyd Cole - Wolves



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