Jesus of Cool
Nick Lowe
1978
There are the artists that I'm familiar with because I know a few hits and am generally aware of their place in the music pantheon due to their commercial success. Then there are the artists whose music I'm not familiar with at all, and really the only thing I'm familiar with is the name, having heard it more than a few times in contexts like music blogs and comment sections, and I wonder who they are and what their deal is. Nick Lowe absolutely falls into the latter category. I maybe even got him mixed up with Nick Cave before this week. Thankfully, Lowe's music sounds nothing like Cave's (i.e. ghostly ambient noises written and performed by a cranky old man).
What does it sound like? The shorthand, I'm told, is "pub rock." That's a genre that I'm familiar with in practice if not in name. The name of the genre has an appeal to me, being a former patron of all things pub-related. According to my go-to source for music genre descriptions, RateYourMusic, this genre formed in the '70s in the U.K. in response to the excesses of prog rock and glam rock. The name comes from the idea that the acolytes of rock 'n' roll were taking the sound away from the arenas and bringing it back to the pubs.
It's not that difficult to find beauty in simplicity, so I back the idea. I mean, at this point it can be both. I've loved plenty of prog rock and glam rock, even a few covered in this blog column, and I also grew to love Jesus of Cool this week. Such a songwriter's album, if that makes sense. Nothing flashy, just some fun lyrics and some catchy pop sensibility combined to make a really fun and easy rock record.
If you go back to that RYM page for the pub rock genre, you'll see that the top ten rated pub rock albums (according to RYM readers' ratings, numbered in the hundreds of thousands) are listed, and the #1 pub rock album of all time is Elvis Costello's My Aim Is True. Guess who produced that album? Nick Lowe. That tells me a couple things. First, Nick Lowe's own music is going to sound similar to Costello's, which is undeniably a good thing. Second, Nick Lowe has perhaps flown under the radar (my radar, at least) for this long because he is more known as a producer and songwriter than a musician in his own right.
There's nothing wrong with that. Maybe it was even to his benefit, because 45 years later you have some asshole like me discovering this thing wholesale and being mildly blown away, and that wouldn't have happened if, say, "I Love the Sound of Breaking Glass" had been a Top Ten hit in the U.S. as opposed to just the U.K. "Underrated" is a term I overuse around these parts, because it's so subjective and because I tend to be the one underrating worthy art, but I do think the term legitimately applies here. Even just based on what I hear from this one album, I am shocked that Nick Lowe's music isn't more well-known.
And trust me, I would have remembered these songs had I ever heard them before. They are instantly familiar. They are so comfortable that I even half convinced myself this week that I had heard some of them before. Doesn't "So It Goes" sound so fucking familiar? I did the research, and it's not featured in any movie or TV show I'm familiar with. Maybe I am subconsciously connecting it with Slaughterhouse-Five, which I reread last year and which features the titular phrase many, many times throughout its pages. More likely, it's that this is rock music in its purest form.
If you're here for a music recommendation (I have no idea if people actually treat PoYB that way, but hey, you never know), then I'd definitely recommend Jesus of Cool for your listening pleasure. I'd say "RIYL Elvis Costello," but that's not really fair to Nick Lowe, since it was Lowe who was influencing Costello originally (both for being an originator of the genre and for literally having a hand in Costello's most acclaimed work), and not the other way around.
It's no fun blogging about an album when the summation boils down to "hey this is a good rock album that you should check out if you haven't already," but I'd rather have it that way than the other way. Sometimes the music can be more enjoyable than the description and analysis of that album. Feel free to listen:
It's not that difficult to find beauty in simplicity, so I back the idea. I mean, at this point it can be both. I've loved plenty of prog rock and glam rock, even a few covered in this blog column, and I also grew to love Jesus of Cool this week. Such a songwriter's album, if that makes sense. Nothing flashy, just some fun lyrics and some catchy pop sensibility combined to make a really fun and easy rock record.
If you go back to that RYM page for the pub rock genre, you'll see that the top ten rated pub rock albums (according to RYM readers' ratings, numbered in the hundreds of thousands) are listed, and the #1 pub rock album of all time is Elvis Costello's My Aim Is True. Guess who produced that album? Nick Lowe. That tells me a couple things. First, Nick Lowe's own music is going to sound similar to Costello's, which is undeniably a good thing. Second, Nick Lowe has perhaps flown under the radar (my radar, at least) for this long because he is more known as a producer and songwriter than a musician in his own right.
There's nothing wrong with that. Maybe it was even to his benefit, because 45 years later you have some asshole like me discovering this thing wholesale and being mildly blown away, and that wouldn't have happened if, say, "I Love the Sound of Breaking Glass" had been a Top Ten hit in the U.S. as opposed to just the U.K. "Underrated" is a term I overuse around these parts, because it's so subjective and because I tend to be the one underrating worthy art, but I do think the term legitimately applies here. Even just based on what I hear from this one album, I am shocked that Nick Lowe's music isn't more well-known.
And trust me, I would have remembered these songs had I ever heard them before. They are instantly familiar. They are so comfortable that I even half convinced myself this week that I had heard some of them before. Doesn't "So It Goes" sound so fucking familiar? I did the research, and it's not featured in any movie or TV show I'm familiar with. Maybe I am subconsciously connecting it with Slaughterhouse-Five, which I reread last year and which features the titular phrase many, many times throughout its pages. More likely, it's that this is rock music in its purest form.
If you're here for a music recommendation (I have no idea if people actually treat PoYB that way, but hey, you never know), then I'd definitely recommend Jesus of Cool for your listening pleasure. I'd say "RIYL Elvis Costello," but that's not really fair to Nick Lowe, since it was Lowe who was influencing Costello originally (both for being an originator of the genre and for literally having a hand in Costello's most acclaimed work), and not the other way around.
It's no fun blogging about an album when the summation boils down to "hey this is a good rock album that you should check out if you haven't already," but I'd rather have it that way than the other way. Sometimes the music can be more enjoyable than the description and analysis of that album. Feel free to listen:
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