awesome (and other songs)

I am on a Nick Lowe jag right now, and I can't stop playing this CD! I am especially taken with the Gee and the Rick and the 3 card trick - don't ask me to explain it, just hit the repeat button and and absorb it. An astonishingly versatile album - get it as soon as possible.

Hey Big Mouth Stand Up And Buy This

Nick Lowe taught me to love country music. Not that this, strictly speaking, a country album, its pure Nick Lowe, poppy, hook dense and irresistible. Sometimes it seems Nick Lowe just can't stumble, he has moved from strength to strength from Brinsley Schwartz to Rockpile to his amazing solo output. This album is no exception; few artists could pull off a ballad like LAFS (Love AT First Sight). Every track here is excellent, but especially good are the bawdy, bizarre `(Hay Big Mouth) Stand Up and Say That', the biting, vicious `God's Gift To Women' and the jaunty, lively `Live Fast, Love Hard, Die Young'. If you like pub rockers like Elvis Costello and Graham Parker, or country rockers like Wilco and The Bottle Rockets, or off kilter madmen like The Beat Farmers or Webb Wilder, you'll like Nick Lowe, hell, everybody likes Nick Lowe.

My First Nick (Or, a Nick Off the Olde Block)

And that's why it's got the big 5 stars. Imagine a 17 year old boy, making a rest stop on a school trip in Worland, Wyoming, walking into a music shop and spotting this album. Now, I knew Nick Lowe's name from his production work on Elvis Costello's albums, but that was it. His music was a mystery...

And then, new musical vistas opened to me (heavenly choir effect, preferably with Dave Edmunds on guitar). The point is, it was nothing like what I expected, and has now been one of my favorite albums for 17 years.

From the tex-mex fun of "Half a boy" to the pure pop (albeit with the Dexys Midnight Runners horn section) of "LAFS," this album does it for me. Along with incorporating huge swaths of country and pub rock, this record revealed to me that music could be important (a la Costello), unassuming (a la Proclaimers), and FUN (NICK!), all at the same time. I hadn't known that before.

It's not Nick's best work (notice how familiar I am, calling him Nick..you will, too). His best is probably either Jesus of Cool or Party of One. But this has such a spot in my heart that I have to give it a rave.

It gets five because for me it was a life changer. For everyone else, a solid 3.5 to 4. Unless of course, you need your life changed.