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Nick Lowe - Quiet Please…The New Best of Nick Lowe
| Slantmagazin |
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There's something unavoidably slimy about greatest hits packages. Stitched together from old singles and repainted with dreary bonus material, these late-career milestones act as musical Cliffs Notes for the unambitious, and, in their rare best instances, stand out as deftly chosen career summations. Quiet Please…The New Best of Nick Lowe, a career-spanning, two-disc compilation, opts for the slightly classier "Best of" title, which hints more at quality than sales and, for a commercially neglected musician like Nick Lowe, suits the mood just fine. But the selections here exhibit an unfortunate lack of filter, leaving an album overloaded with spurious material; with 49 tracks from an artist who's put out 12 albums, this might as well have been called Most of Nick Lowe. Yes, it seems frivolous to quibble over the size of a career retrospective, but as perfunctory as these things may seem, they undoubtedly function as arbiters of a musician's legacy, not to mention an access point for curious potential fans. In that regard Quiet Please is nearly inapproachable. Besides its two-hour-plus length, the album gives no special regard to good material, granting equal status to Lowe's infrequent bouts of embarrassing schlock, as seen in the inexplicable appearance of "I Knew the Bride (When She Used to Rock and Roll)," a depressingly cheesy song with wedding-reception aspirations. Even worse, a piece of weak later material, 1990's "All Men Are Liars," is given primacy as the album's lead single. All this only serves to dilute the razor-sharp pop that actually belongs on a best-of disc....full text |
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| Rollingstones |
| This veteran Brit rocker knows exactly where to put notes, chords and words for maximum satiric effect — while paying tribute to every kind of classic pop. When he hit his commercial prime in the late Seventies on his solo albums Jesus of Cool and Labour of Lust, he proved himself a New Wave master at playing, arranging and producing songs that sounded completely contemporary even as they evoked rock's past (see the deceptively lightweight but guitar–layered smash "Cruel to Be Kind"). As trends came and went, so did that knack, but this 49–track anthology smooths out his inspirational potholes on the path to his current renaissance as a weathered but still witty crooner....full text |
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| Allmusic |
| Quiet Please bears the subtitle "The New Best of Nick Lowe," making no attempt to disguise the fact that it's been a full 20 years since Nick's last hits collection, Basher. That "new" designation is also a subtle indication of the editorial slant of Quiet Please, how it shifts away from the frenzied new wave rocker toward the swinging songwriter of the '90s and 2000s, and not just because the second disc of this double-disc set is devoted to the mellow, deeply felt country-rock and torch songs that have been Lowe's specialty since 1994's The Impossible Bird. Compilation producer Gregg Geller admits to bypassing Lowe's covers in favor of his originals -- that explains why such singles as "Switchboard Susan," "Teacher Teacher," and "7 Nights to Rock" aren't here -- but he also deliberately skews the selection of songs from the '70s and '80s to create a common thread from Brinsley Schwarz's 1974 finale The New Favourites to 2007's At My Age, one that concentrates on Lowe's wry, immaculately crafted songs and not the pop prankster Jesus of Cool. This approach may fit the sensibility of Lowe's latter-day records, illustrating the through line from "Endless Sleep" and "You Make Me" to "Lately I've Let Things Slide" and "Indian Queens," but it isn't necessarily a more accurate reading of his career. After all, until The Impossible Bird, there was a lot of rock & roll in Lowe's albums, something that this collection downplays quite a bit -- but if that's the side of Nick you need to hear, stick with Basher, whose title speaks to its style as much as Quiet Please. Plus, this rock & roll deficiency is the only flaw on this otherwise sterling collection, the first to cover pretty much his entire career, which means it's the first to give an idea of just what a consistent body of work Lowe has built up over the years. Over the course of two discs and 49 tracks, the sounds may shift but the quality doesn't: there's not a dip in quality and everything on the second disc holds its own with the music on the first. Throughout it all, Lowe's knack for sly, understated songcraft shines and if he doesn't necessarily get better over the years, he might get seamless, writing songs so elegantly polished and delivered they seem effortless. While it could hardly be said to have all of Nick's best -- it not only is skimpy on rock and Rockpile, but also only one cut from Brinsley Schwarz -- it does what so few career-spanning compilations do: it tells a story and stands as testament to the artist's enormous talents....full text |
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