Send "Nick Lowe " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 Deep into "Born Fighters", a 1979 BBC documentary on the simultaneous recording of Nick Lowe's Labour of Lust and Dave Edmunds' Repeat When Necessary that year, the two Rockpile bandmates are arguing on either side of a kitchen table. Lowe, pub rock pioneer, is trying to express just how much everyman gloom and despair plays a part in his songwriting, going so far as to compare himself to "Joe Blow," the guy who delivers the milk. "I supposedly write the theme music for 'Coronation Street', for life," he says. "That's what I set myself up to do." Edmunds isn't having it. The Welsh rocker lets his friend know that a) he doesn't have anything at all in common with Joe Blow; and b) he thinks what Lowe just said is "stupid, really stupid." Lowe replies with the sort of twinkling deadpan that's defined so much of his pop music: "That's why I think you and me are friends."It's a great scene captured during the making of a great album. Lowe and Edmunds had become friends a few years earlier, when the latter, a guitar-wielding, rock'n'roll purist from Cardiff, helped produce 1974's The New Favourites of Brinsley Schwarz, the final album from Lowe's legendary pub-rocking outfit. After that band dissolved, Lowe also took to production (nicknamed "Basher," he helped shape the roughly-hewn sounds of Elvis Costello's first five LPs as well as the debut from pop-punk blueprinters the Damned) and joined up with Rockpile, Edmunds' tireless touring band. That's who we hear behind him in Labour of Lust, his follow-up to solo debut/masterpiece, 1978's Jesus of Cool. Out-of-print since its last CD run in 1990, it's an album far more cohesive and contained than its eclectic, bursting-at-the-seams predecessor. What it lacks in variety or ragged kineticism, it makes up for in the kind of thorough, clock-punching craftsmanship you'd expect from a guy who sees some of himself in a milkman....full text |
| Rollingstone |
| As a songwriter and producer (Elvis Costello, the Pretenders), Nick Lowe helped turn U.K. punk into pop. This long-out-of-print 1979 set, a hookfest full of barbed wit, was his own pop moment. The hit was "Cruel to Be Kind," an Everly Brothers-meet-Stylistics defense of masochism. Less radio-friendly are "Big Kick, Plain Scrap," which repeats the phrase "on drugs" over tweaked New Orleans funk, and "American Squirm," which features Costello. It's not all catchy snark: The bonus B side "Basing Street" is a ballad involving spilled blood and a pill-popping DJ — a taste of the country-folk storytelling Lowe would master decades later....full text |
| Avclub |
| With a little more luck and a little less label trouble, Rockpile might have been a household name. A quartet made up of Nick Lowe, Dave Edmunds, Billy Bremmer, and Terry Williams, the band recorded and toured together, but never got the chance to release an album under its own name until tensions—some caused by those contractual difficulties and the management teams navigating them—had nearly wrung the collaboration dry. That left listeners in the position of having to patch together Rockpile’s career from one proper album and a handful of Edmunds and Lowe solo albums (and some odds and ends recorded with other artists), including a pair of 1979 releases recorded in tandem: Edmunds’ Repeat When Necessary and Lowe’s Labour Of Lust. After spending years out of print, the latter is now receiving a much-needed reissue. Lowe has suggested that a truly killer Rockpile LP could have been pieced together from the Repeat and Lust sessions. That isn’t really fair to either album, however. Repeat remains one of Edmunds’ best efforts, and Lust one of Lowe’s. Both showcase what a remarkable, diverse band Rockpile was, dealing in classic pop that fit perfectly into the scorched landscape cleared by punk’s back-to-basics demands. “Cruel To Be Kind,” a leftover from Lowe’s time with Brinsley Schwarz that was reluctantly recorded at Columbia Records’ insistence, provided him with his biggest hit, but Lust, even more than Lowe’s stunning solo debut from the year before, Jesus Of Cool, sounds like a collection of hits waiting to happen. Though it’s a Rockpile album in all but name, Lust has its own identity. Lowe’s tracks frequently break from the, in Lowe’s words, “Amphetamine-fueled Chuck Berry music” sound that defined the band. “Cracking Up” and “Big Kick, Plain Scrap!” have a nervous edge, and “You Make Me” and “Basing Street”—a masterfully tragic song rescued here from B-side obscurity—anticipate the mature singer-songwriter albums that have been Lowe’s specialty since 1994’s The Impossible Bird. Fast-charging roots-rock gets plenty of room here, too, most notably with the anthemic “Born Fighter” and “Without Love,” the latter of which Johnny Cash covered in later years. Maybe Rockpile could have kept going, or maybe, in the end, the band played too fast, hard, and well to last even without label complications. Either way, this reissue finally gives one of its finest moments an overdue second chance....full text |
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