Moon , Friend

Cunning Cavorite
Craft carelessly crashes
Captured by moon friends

Your New Favourite Band by The Hives

Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated? Maybe I’m being a little harsh, but a 28 minute compilation album with 12 songs is a bit of an odd choice. Looking back, the previous two albums were of similar length so they could have just chucked them both on a single cd for the UK release. Anyway, I’ve nothing against short albums per se, and this is a good example of short songs that don’t feel short, all around the two minute mark with only one over 3 minutes.

They are most entertaining post-punk/garage rock sung and played with considerable enthusiasm. Nothing revolutionary, but they sound like a lot of fun and looking up clips on YouTube shows that they are indeed an excellent live band - not quite main stage headliners but there’s nothing wrong with that.

Café Bleu by The Style Council

Paul Weller is a very serious man. Adam Buxton tells the story of interviewing him on the radio one time and making the joke “Ah Weller, Weller, Weller, ooh - tell me more” which was received in stony silence. His previous band, the Jam, was laser focused on making sharp political points through a mix of mod and punk, without any of the joy or spontaneity of either of those genres.

With the Style Council he made an abrupt change into a mix of easy listening jazz, soul and hip-hop, seemingly aimed at the after dinner yuppie CD crowd. As a general rule if you have to state that you are cool or stylish, you are probably not, and councils are more generally associated with bin collections and the like, but we’ll let that go. It’s pleasant enough listening, with jazzy instrumentals and songs that sneak in some of his previous left wing politics hoping that the yuppies won’t listen too closely.

There’s a guest appearance from Tracy Thorn of Everything but the Girl which is probably the high point of the album, but then a couple of tracks later we come to A Gospel which has some bizarrely out of place rapping and drum machine beats, thankfully not performed by Mr Weller.

The overall effect is something of a curate’s egg and probably not something I’d go back to.

Killdeer

Note to screen writer
Bambi needs some more pathos
Make 'em cry - killdeer!

Soak

After weeks of drought
Blessed rains soak the parched earth
The green will return

Rattlesnakes by Lloyd Cole

Lloyd Cole - now there’s a name I’ve not heard in a long, long time.

Back in 1984 when I first listened to this album I was a new student at Sheffield University and a hopeless romantic, in the sense that I was hopeless at it. Like Lloyd I would regularly fall in love and imagine scenarios where someone would be impressed by my literary allusions and knowledge of On The Waterfront, before realising that it was unlikely they would be interested in a computer geek with less than perfect skin, and I would go back to studying Pascal (the programming language not the philosopher).

Musically, this jangly guitar pop sounded great on my hifi that I’d blown half my grant money on, and I found that I could still remember all of the words 40 years or more after first hearing them. Lyrically, it's as arch and earnest as you might expect from a university philosophy student who's been listening to a bit too much Bob Dylan, but I definitely related to it at the time. It wasn’t entirely a surprise to find out that Lloyd was also painfully shy and dreaded live shows to the point where he would perform with his back to the audience.

Does it hold up? Nostalgia is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, but I did enjoy the new to me bonus tracks that weren't on my cassette tape copy back in the day. Was it influential? Probably not, but it did have an influence on me, so I’m giving it 4 stars for old times sake.

Lamplight

Driving someone mad
By changing the truth comes from
That old film Lamplight