Graham Coxon - Happiness In Magazines
Reviewed by Mojo, 2004

Who'd have thought we'd ever hear Graham Coxon singing, "Life, I love you", to delicate piano plinks and swells of brass? Or that he'd release an album of straight-up, dazzlingly well-realised British pop? Yet post-Blur, and now sweet sodden sober, Coxon presents his bravest and most focused work yet.

Happiness In Magazines is a record that eschews distorted tangles of sound and scribbled vignettes of inner turmoil for lucid, brittle, daylight realism. In poking his head out from some darkened Camden hidey hole, it's as if Coxon has opened his eyes to a world that's bleak and battered, but animated and bright. And never has his feelings for joy been more sweetly obvious: the single, Freakin' Out, is a mucky punk romp, as sparklingly pop as Another Girl, Another Planet, and Spectacular has Coxon not just rockin', but audibly grunting.

But what makes Happiness...something more than Coxon cocking a leg in the wind to his naysayers, are those tracks that not only take a stocky run at living, but really take off and fly. All Over Me is a soft, lithe ballad, guided by Cosmic Dancer-styled strings, its story (collapsing in the shower, the blood wiped away by a lover) sung in a new, glassy upper range. Ribbons And Leaves has the same fragile beauty - part Wyatt's Rock Bottom, part Percy-era Ray Davies, and all urge to communicate. That the album feels so well rounded is in no small part down to Stephen Street's crisp, immediate production - and, one suspects, his committed coaching of Coxon, who sings the intro to Don't Be A Stranger loudly and with no accompaniment at all (not even the protection of his beloved Telecaster) Proof, in Coxon's case then, that fear is over, if you want it.

 (4/5)                                                                                    Sophie Harris