Nick Lowe: Jesus of Cool (Re-issue) : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

The most blasphemous thing about Nick Lowe's 1978 debut solo album was not its original British title. It was the subtext running through his classic — pop and American — roots pastiches on that LP and its U.S. version, Pure Pop for Now People, issued with a slightly different track list. Many of the songs in this combined reissue (with period singles) are about getting screwed by fools, goons and circumstance — "Nutted by Reality," as Lowe put it in one shamelessly Beatlesque chorus. An alumnus of the battle — scarred band Brinsley Schwarz, Lowe spent some of his best vitriol on the record business. Note the past tense in the galloping rise — and — fall tale "They Called It Rock" and the way he sings "music" as "muzak" in the heavy cynicism of "Music for Money." But for Lowe, the best revenge was always a knockout hook, throaty Duane Eddy — like twang from his Rockpile cohorts Dave Edmunds and Billy Bremner, and a bright rain of Pet Sounds — style harmonies, and they're all here, in a provocative array of combinations: the wall of sighs in "Little Hitler," the Phil Spector — spangled gore of "Marie Provost," the delicious menace of the piano bursts and deep tremolo guitar of "I Love the Sound of Breaking Glass." Lowe still makes great records of pop gleam and wise irony, but this is his Book of Genesis.