In which a good ol' boy comes home.
Persons familiar with Nick Lowe in his recent incarnation as cynical-old-Basher, the man who'll steal any lick that isn't nailed down, disguise himself as anything on earth to make a buck and ally himself with unsavoury people like Jake Riviera and Elvis Costello in order to form vicious, self-congratulatory little cliques . . . boy, are they in for a shock or what?
On the cover of Jesus Of Cool, Lowe manifested himself as everything from leather-clad mirror-shaded sleaze-rocker to dumb hippie to wasted jetsetter to the greasy-haired dyspeptic hungover opportunist that most of his detractors like to think he really was. The dislocated ragbag of pearls and pigshit that the sleeve turned out to house reinforced Lowe's rep as seedy, scheming Machiavelli, and as he metamorphosed from lurching pissartist to gumchewing truculent wideboy on Rockpile gigs and Stiff tour, it seemed that since the epoch-making release of "So It Goes"/ "Heart Of The City" as Stiff BUY 1, Lowe had done a fairly thorough job of reinventing himself.
After all, apart from a gang of superannuated pubrockers, who remembered the diffident, ponytailed bassist-vocalist-composer who'd slugged along all those years with Brinsley Schwarz, the ultimate no-hope goodtime losers who declared non-violent war on the dinosaurs and fought them in the cellars and the bars? Yep, that Nick Lowe. You didn't miss him? Well, he's back.
Bend an eye onto the big black 'n' white pic of our humble hero on the inner sleeve of this album. Dig the lumberjack shirt and the sheepish grin and god does he ever need a haircut (Jesus!). Pure pubrock for pissed people is what Nick's selling here, and after the demented eclecticism of his work as producer and performer since '76, it's about the last thing he could've done which would still have been unpredictable.
Cases: the featured musicians throughout are Dave Edmunds and Bill Bremner (guitars and backing vox) and the immortal Terry Williams on drums (listen, God, when you get around to setting up that Rock Drummers Hall Of Fame you keep talking about, book Tel a seat as near to Charlie Watts as you can, awright?) plus guest shots from Bluesy Huey Lewis on harp and former Brinsleyite Bob Andrews (now gainfully employed with The Rumour) on synth, who get one apiece. The music stays within earshot of the old territories: R&B, country, lush pop with a bite and the odd touch of swaggering barroom rock 'n' roll. Real straight arrow. The only surprise is no surprises.
First play through and it sounds a touch drab with the excellent single "Crackin' Up" as the highspot and the wimp ballad "You Make Me" as the lowest of the Lowe (damn thing's so soppy that it shorted out my stereo). Stick with it and you groove on the fake aggression of "Born Fighter" (just the sort of thing us closet wimps like to stay in and listen to when we'd be going out and getting into fights if we were Real Men), the extraordinary every-instrument-playing-percussion "Clapping Song" ripoff of "Big Kick, Plain Scrap!," the innocent double-entendres of Mickey Jupp's "Switchboard Susan," the mock-Spectorisms of "Skin Deep" (which I hate 'cause I wrote a song called "Skin Deep" myself and people are gonna think I stole it off him, as if anyone could be said to have stolen from Nick Lowe, bloody magpie that he is, grrr), the pure country corn of "Endless Grey Ribbon," the R&B riffing of "Love So Fine"...
Nick Lowe's built his current rep by cooking up fiendishly frothy pop confectionery with arsenic frosting. Here he turns around and re-enters the room with a big platter of pure beef hamburgers (or pure ham beefburgers — have it your way). Recorded as a bookend to the new Edmunds album, which also features a straightahead Rockpile line-up (Edmunds and Bremner on guitars, Williams on drums and Lowe on bass — weren't you listening?), Labour Of Lust replaces ingenuity with integrity, and thereby promotes the specious if unstated theory that the two are mutually exclusive.
I love the honesty and commitment of Lowe's Rockpile-oriented work but I miss the clever-dickery of his Jesus Of Cool stuff, and possibly he does his best work when the two come face to face on things like "They Called It Rock" ('Pile version available on the B-side of the "Breaking Glass" single) or the live cut of "Heart Of The City."
"Crackin' Up" is the champ of this album for precisely that reason, and people who dig Nick Lowe because they love being amiably conned by a master may find Labour Of Lust to be unaccustomedly plain fare by comparison.
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