Bob Dylan wrote some sophisticated love songs in his twenties (check "Mama, You Been on My Mind" or "She's Lover Now"), but he needed to live a little before making Blood on the Tracks. Indeed, part of the fun in tracking an artist over the course of a long and varied career is in seeing how their writing changes as they age and gain perspective. Pete Townshend was absolutely right to pen, "I hope I die before I get old," when he was a kid, but then he had the nuts to live it through and write "Slit Skirts," the rock song that best captures the fear of aging, as he approached middle age. That's artistic growth, my friends.

Ideas about growth, or the lack of it, are what keep me from digging this Lloyd Cole album. Sexy and melodically appealing pop singles like "Perfect Skin," "Undressed," and "Tell Your Sister" made me a Lloyd Cole fan in the late 80's and early 90's. Cole had a romantic outlook on life full of brooding characters, dramatic epiphanies, and sharp observation. It fit perfectly with how I wanted to experience the world, and his songs were catchy as hell to boot. As I check back in ten years on, I find... the same old Lloyd.

Case in point: "Vin Ordinaire." Something about these lines rubs me the wrong way:

June is smoking with a vengeance
She's trying to look like Patti Smith
I think she's trying to make a statement
But neither she nor I know what it is

Same goes for "No More Love Songs":

I gave her whiskey and she gave me everything
There was a boy, she said, beautiful, eloquent
He went to Spain and where he went, she went
No Joan of Arc, she was broken, discarded

These are not mature people. Why would a guy in his 40s hang out with girls who smoke and try to look like Patti Smith while they follow some asshole around Spain? She's probably got a bedroom table loaded with candle wax-encrusted bottles and dried flowers. Everyone needs to have a doomed romantic stage, but Lloyd's is going on twenty years. True, Lloyd could just be writing from the perspective of the senior liberal arts major, assuming a fictional persona, but who wants to hear him do that? Plenty of bands that age are already covering those bases.

The lyrical juvenilia is a bit of a shame, because this is a solid collection of pop songs otherwise. Cole hasn't changed his sound much-- it's still jangly guitars, bass, drums-- but he has a good voice and writes good melodies so that's forgivable. "Impossible Girl" and "Past Imperfect" are particularly memorable, matching his early 90's best. And there is range here, from the hushed, spare "No More Love Songs" to the melodic crunch of "Negative Attitude." But I just can't remove my focus from Cole's stories. It's like I'm having a conversation with an old friend who seems stuck at the time of our last meeting. And frankly, it's depressing.

-Mark Richard-San