live @ the Birchmere 12.28.2000
Lloyd Cole began his solo acoustic show at the Birchmere Thursday night with a new song called “No More Love Songs”. Of course, he then preceded to play a whole bunch anyway. That kind of dramatic contradiction is at the heart of Cole’s best songs, and his two-hour, career-spanning show revealed that his work has lost little of its’ dramatic edge.
A month shy of his fortieth birthday, Cole no longer writes in the literary, Leonard Cohen and Lou Reed-obsessed style that marked his 1984 debut with the Commotions. The more conservative template he uses now may be attributable to things like being dropped by his record label and becoming a parent, but he hasn’t completely abandoned his bookish tendencies. A fair example of his current mindset: he began the show by asking how many of the near-capacity crowd were paying babysitters, yet still covered Cohen’s “Chelsea Hotel” and dropped Joseph Conrad, Martin Amis and Kurt Vonnegut casually into between-song banter.
Cutting many of his songs nearly in half, Cole correctly sensed that many of his compositions miss the Byrdsian-jangle he often records them with. Still, in more than 35 selections his voice and guitar covered nearly everything well, from early Commotions classics (“Four Flights Up”, “Rattlesnakes”, “Lost Weekend”, “Cut Me Down”), middle-period solo records (“Butterfly”, “Mister Wrong”, “Sentimental Fool”), covers (“Bob Dylan’s “You’re A Big Girl Now”, George Jones’ “She Thinks I Still Care”) and new tunes. The latter came from a record with his new band The Negatives, out as an import and with songs like “Past Imperfect” and “That Boy” suggesting ---as did Thursday’s show---that Cole is still capable of matching the vitality of his best early work.
Washington Post, December 2000
