Lloyd Cole and the Commotions
Rattlesnakes
About This Review
Re-Play reviews look back at landmark albums — how they were received at the time of release, the influence they've had on music in the years since, and where they stand today.
At Release
Lloyd Cole arrived fully formed. That was perhaps the most striking thing about Rattlesnakes when it landed in October 1984: the sheer completeness of the vision. Here was a twenty-two-year-old from Derbyshire who had been reading Simone de Beauvoir and Norman Mailer and Bukowski alongside the music press, and who had somehow alchemized those inputs into a debut album that sounded like nothing else in the charts while also being perfectly accessible. The first single, 'Perfect Skin,' charted at number 26 in the UK. The album itself reached number 13. For a record this genuinely literary, those were extraordinary numbers.
The contemporary reviews focused heavily on Cole's lyrical debts — the name-dropping of writers and actresses and cultural signifiers was noticed by everyone who wrote about the record, and some found it pretentious in the manner of someone who wants you to know they have been to a library. Others, correctly, understood that the references were functional rather than decorative: de Beauvoir's name in 'Perfect Skin' does actual work in the line, not just as a name-drop but as a compressed argument about the character being described. The music press largely loved it. Melody Maker placed it in the top five albums of the year.
The band behind Cole was remarkable. Blair Cowan's keyboards provided the Velvets-inflected drone that underpinned many of the arrangements. Neil Clark's guitar playing was precise, chiming, and rhythmically sophisticated. Lawrence Donegan's bass lines moved with a melodic intelligence that is rarer than it should be in rock music. Together they created an environment in which Cole's words could land with the weight they required.
What Rattlesnakes gave American indie rock was a model for how to be literate and romantic without being arch — how to mean it while also knowing that meaning it has a slightly comic dimension when you are young and uncertain and making your first record.
The Influence
Rattlesnakes had an outsize influence on a specific and important strain of British guitar pop — the thoughtful, literary strand that runs through the 1980s and emerges periodically in subsequent decades. The Divine Comedy, which spent the 1990s building a career on the intersection of wit, melody, and conspicuous literary reference, owes more to Cole than to any of the artists it more frequently cited. Prefab Sprout's Paddy McAloon, working in a parallel universe of similar ambitions, shared with Cole an insistence that pop lyrics could bear the same weight as poetry without being any less pleasurable to encounter.
In America, the record's influence was felt somewhat differently. R.E.M. were already pursuing some of the same territory, though from a more impressionistic angle; the comparison, when it was made at the time, did neither band any favors because it obscured how distinct their approaches actually were. What Rattlesnakes gave American indie rock was a model for how to be literate and romantic without being arch — how to mean it while also knowing that meaning it has a slightly comic dimension when you are young and uncertain and making your first record.
Where It Stands Today
eventually caught up to. Its combination of melodic directness and lyrical density — the tunes are instantly memorable, the words require several passes — anticipates the approach that would make Pulp's Jarvis Cocker a celebrity in the 1990s and that continues to drive the best British songwriting today. The record does not sound dated in the way that many contemporaneous productions do; Blair Cowan's keyboards have a warmth that avoided the worst excesses of mid-1980s production.
What holds up most firmly is the writing. 'Charlotte Street,' 'Are You Ready to Be Heartbroken,' and the title track remain model examples of how to construct a lyric that rewards attention without withholding the primary pleasures of a pop song. Cole has continued to make records of considerable quality in the decades since, but Rattlesnakes remains the document that most completely captures what he could do when every element of his craft arrived simultaneously at its full expression.