I dare you to use that album title as a pickup line. I dare you to even work it into casual conversation, without someone thinking that you're alluding to Sammy Hagar or Tom Cochrane or David Brent. The heinous phrase is code, I hope, for a classified ad that Coxon should have already placed: LYRICIST WANTED. WILL PAY IN NME AWARDS. Love's already a battlefield, and the drug, and hurts, and will tear us apart, but did you know that it also broke the speed limit?
Coxon's latest contains a pretty sweet almost-hour of idea-less rock on which he sounds less like a veteran than an upstart. To obligatorily bring up the old war: Anyone who cherished how the last Oasis record triumphantly channeled the energy of that band's ancestors should enjoy this homage to the roots of Blur. Always a tad tighter and less daft than their Stones-baiting rivals, the Blur co-helmed by Coxon owed a debt to 45s that came out between the peak of the Who knockoff glut up until right before Manchester "happened." Thus this quaintly brash album stomps into the retroturf of bands referred to sniggeringly as the Pistols and the 'Cocks. (Spiked leather restraints, and this album's clunky ballads, are keeping me from typing a Punklife pun.)
Contradiction city: These are drinking songs, sadistically, from an artist famously on the wagon. The titles and lyrics are 90% cliché, but Coxon makes them poignant via the refrain (on "Don't Believe Anything I Say") of "I'll be thinking about these words forever," which seems as much an admission of writer's block as it does a taunt about being purposefully direct, even if it results in sounding (ewww) conventional. The power-pop is so deliberately rigid-- its Townsend is jagged and even its jangle is abrupt-- that iPodded variety-addicts might long for an interval with Doherty's huh-we-taping? shambles. And why in the world is a rugged flashback record hosting adult contemporary saxomophone-jam "Flights in the Sea (Lovely Rain)"? So you've outlived Jesus and have a wonderful daughter, Mr. Coxon; congrats-- no need to go all "mature" on us.
Pardon my statesideism, but he sounds like a British David Lowery. No, wait, he sounds like the Rentals when they "went British" for that second album. Except he's pissed off and backed by big nasty organs on the disappointment-addicted "You Always Let Me Down". Except he's either homoerotically covetous or angry at younger models on "What's He Got": "Got a brown leather jacket and tight blue jeans/ Wears a pair of Beatle boots just like me." If I may stoop to tabloid conjecture, doesn't the first line, "Saw you on the corner by the cash machine" suggest that Hard-Fi are among his targets?
A buoyant guitarist has gotten over abstraction, which makes life momentarily difficult for his haymaking critics. The slightness of this album is hard to hold a grudge against, but ain't nothing oh-my-god necessary about it either. "Gimme Some Love", for example, is one of the dumber things that an artist can command, but damn if Coxon doesn't demand it riotously and convincingly.
