3. Lloyd Cole & The CommotionsRattlesnakes
“She looks like Eva Marie Saint in On The Waterfront…” It’s a record from my teenage years. Some records, they come and go, like The Waterboys’ This Is The Sea. I loved it for a long time and still do occasionally, but sometimes I can’t really take it. But Rattlesnakes is one that always stood up for me. And I guess [I also liked] this idea of a band that had this Velvet Underground influence, and went on to do something contemporary. I think I saw them do ‘Perfect Skin’ on the TV before it even came out as a single, so I was an early adopter, and it’s a record that I keep listening to, have listened to several times recently.
The guitar sound is amazing, like on ‘Forest Fire’. I even like the organ, not my favourite instrument, on ‘Speedboat’, which was a song I was always really intrigued with. And it has this nice arc in the record, like the first Big Star album, where towards the end it just kind of drifts off. The songs get a bit more melancholy and there’s no grand ending, it just kind of peters away.
