Bad Vibes

Bad Vibes

On 1993's Bad Vibes—Lloyd Cole’s third solo album—he takes his first-person narratives for a walk on the rock side, with occasional drum loops and nods to T. Rex. The guitar hooks are big and often Beatle-esque (“Morning Is Broken,” “My Way to You”), and the soothing leitmotifs in such songs as “Holier Than Thou” and “Fall Together” uphold his bittersweet yarns with aplomb. What’s great about Cole is how his lyrics move like well-paced short fiction. He catalogs and (occasionally) satirizes personal detachment, failure, and love’s beginnings and endings. On “Mister Wrong,” he’s the protagonist who can’t stop making his woman cry (“Yes I’m tough to be around/Babe you’re tough to be away from”), while in “Too Much of a Good Thing,” he’s the borderline creepy blue-collar man taking lewd stock of his perfect lover. On the poppy “So You’d Like to Save the World,” Cole lampoons wide-eyed campus crusaders from the all-knowing vantage of a barstool curmudgeon. Cole’s crack band here includes longtime pals Matthew Sweet, Fred Maher, Anton Fier, and Adam Peters.

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