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Album Details
- Artist: Graham Coxon
- Album: Love Travels At Illegal Speeds
- Label: EMI
- Year of Release: 2006
- ME Rating:
- Reviewed by: christopherdrew on 2006-12-22
Recommend"This album, it's like getting really drunk, but not sick-drunk, just happy-drunk, and then hanging out with friends at some stranger's party in the upstairs of some old house, and then falling down every flight of stairs in a huge tangle but not breaking your neck. It's like lying in a stupor on the ground, drool pooling between your cheek and the sidewalk as you watch someone pull back and aim a kick at your head, but then they miss completely and end up landing flat on their ass. It's like piling fifteen inebriated monkeys into a small 2-door Honda and letting your 'special' cousin drive, and spinning out of control on black ice but somehow ending up safe in the middle of the school's soccer field, the car's tires bent in from the impact on the curb, but besides that everyone's okay. (True story)
It's like all of that, except that it's got some slow bits as well. You should own this. Like, for real."
I wrote that back in March, when this album came out; nine months later and it still holds up. Well, kinda; you really wish the two slow songs would just go away (unless you're a girl, in which you case you probably find the songs dweamy...), but the rest of this album is fast-paced brit-pop done to perfection: sloppy, irreverent and addictive.
(And, yes, it totally was a true story, and I'm never getting into that person's car again...)
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on 2012-04-07 CharlesMartel Said:
After the demise of Blur (and before their recent revival), Graham Coxon went on to put out a number of albums under his own name. He tried to put Blur behind him, in more ways than one, for he admitted that he had snorted far too much coke during his time with the band. But whereas Damon Albarn, Blur's frontman, went on to renewed success with Gorillaz, Coxon was destined to remain in obscurity as a solo artist.
Now while I have a lot of respect for Damon Albarn, Coxon was always something of a mystery man. " Love Travels at Illegal Speeds " does nothing to uncover that mystery. If I had to describe a Graham Coxon album without having heard anything of his solo work, then I would describe something pretty close to this. It is fairly standard pop rock fayre which shows its age and its influences, with the occasional horn or piano. It is dominated by Coxon's guitar work, unsurprisingly, and suffers from a lack of decent lyrics for, whatever else Graham Coxon may have been, he was no lyricist when with Blur.
In short then, a continuation of Britpop is what you would expect here, and that is pretty much whwat you get. Okay, the arrangements on " Just a State of Mind " make this track stand out in more ways than one, but that rare flourish of originality is not enough to save the album from mediocrity. " I Don't Wanna Go Out" sounds as if it could be a cover of some seventies hard rock band, while elsewhere the sounds of the Buzzcocks, the Jam and other punk influenced powerpoppers is strongly marked.
Coxon's lyrics are exactly what you would expect. The album is a litany of I-nearly-found-love-but-it-slipped-away lyrics which, while nothing offensive in themselves, do get a bit repetitive after a while. There are some good melodies buried in here and some of the songs are quite catchy, but then the same could be said of a lot of Blur's stuff. I would have liked to find a lot more in here than I did and the resulting feeling is one of disappointment. Coxon never quite manages to reach the heights which his ambition has set him. You can easily see here that there is a lot underneath which hints at something better. The trouble is that it never really emerges on the album. Perhaps Coxon as a solo artist lacked the requirement of someone to bounce his ideas off, someone like, like Damon Albarn, perhaps.
Rating: 6/10
