Seemingly as irascible as he is independent, Lloyd Cole is the ideal songwriter/musician to be using electronics as a means to write and record. As on 2019’s, Guesswork, the once and future leader of The Commotions creates, populates, and inhabits a digital nether region that corresponds to his inner world(s) and, by extension, our own.
Proceeding directly from the random digital noise generator Cole used as the basis for the four long, abstract compositions of 2020’s Dunst, Lloyd decided to apply that musique concrète approach to songs that came to comprise On Pain. Produced by Chris Hughes (studio overseer of Tears For Fears‘ classic 1985 album Songs From The Big Chair), the album is a seamless composite of exclusively remote interactions between the artist and producer, from and to Cole’s Massachusetts’ attic studio ‘The Establishment.’
Again featuring contributions from former Commotions keyboardist Blair Cowan and guitarist Neil Clark, the collaborative nature of this record to a great degree belies Lloyd Cole’s insular persona, but only to a (productive) point. Besides those aforementioned long-term collaborators, the contributors here include backing singers Joan Wasser, Renée LoBue, and Dave Derby plus Mark Frith on programming, a limited roster that functions as a tacit reinforcement of Cole’s iconoclasm.
In turn, the corps of participants mirror the inner dialogue On Pain represents. As do reveries such as “This Can’t Be Happening” and “Wolves:” the former reeks of desperate agitation, while the latter, despite its restful intro and the falsetto singing, radiates revulsion to what’s outside as well as what’s inside. Both tracks are couched in an almost poisonous sense of distance and dislocation.
Yet as a purposeful means of maintaining at least some measure of equilibrium, Cole’s intent could not be more clear in his inclusion of “I Can Hear Everything;” a recording permeated with the sing-song quality of a music box, this selection hints at the inner child may well be immune to the impersonality of our age.
As if to reaffirm that point is the comforting warmth of intimacy that emanates from and pervades the electronic frameworks of “You Are Here Now” and “More of What You Are.” Likewise, “Warm By The Fire” is an eloquent expression of a finite sense of place, a fleeting sensation worth savoring whenever it should arrive.
As it appears on “The Idiot” and elsewhere, the immediacy of this recorded sound renders the music appropriately personal (and even more appropriate for hearing on headphones). And, fittingly, in such tracks as “I Can Hear Everything,” the plush depth of the mix conjures up a tangible cinematic quality also mirrored in the profile of the artist in the cover graphic).In the end, Lloyd Cole makes the title of On Pain sound ironic. It’s as if the eight tracks and thirty-seven minutes are intended as an antidote to the psychic turbulence pervading the world at large in 2023.
