Graham Coxon - Love Travels At Illegal Speeds
Reviewed by The Independent, 10 March 2006

Love may well travel at illegal speeds, but Graham Coxon seems firmly stuck in reverse gear here, with an album of throwback punk-pop mostly built on 30-year-old templates devised by the likes of The Ramones and Buzzcocks. Nothing too wrong with that, I suppose - although if The Ramones had indulged similarly anachronistic tastes three decades ago, punk might have been big-band swing - but there's something sad, even creepy, about a fellow pushing 40 displaying such adolescent attitudes to love and loss. Unless he's being disingenuous, it's not hard to see why Coxon appears to have little success in cementing enduring relationships: whether haranguing former partners ("You Always Let Me Down"), sulking in his room ("I Don't Wanna Go Out"), lusting after the unattainable ("I Can't Look at Your Skin" and "Don't Let Your Man Know") or brooding over being dumped ("What's He Got?"), he sounds like Kevin the Teenager inhabiting the body of a grown man, unable to cope with basic emotions with which he should be familiar by now. To give him his due, he acknowledges as much in "Don't Believe Anything I Say", admitting "I'm just a boy to me" - but that doesn't make this any less of a babysitting exercise.

DOWNLOAD THIS: Standing on My Own Again, Tell It Like It Is

 (2/5)                                                                                                        Andy Gill