Cool, have to take a new listen to this album, as I'm late to the Nick Lowe party.On the cover of his solo debut album Jesus of Cool, Nick Lowe is pictured in six rock & roll getups — hippie, folkie, greasy rock & roller, new wave hipster — giving the not-so-subtle implication that this guy can do anything. Nick proves that assumption correct on Jesus of Cool, a record so good it was named twice, as Lowe’s American record label got the jitters with Jesus and renamed it Pure Pop for Now People, shuffling the track listing (but not swapping songs) in the process. As it happens, both titles are accurate, but while the UK title — now restored for Yep Roc’s terrific 30th Anniversary edition — sounds cooler, capturing Lowe’s cheerfully blasphemous rock & roll swagger, Pure Pop describes the sound of the album, functioning as a sincere description of the music while conveying the wicked, knowing humor that drives it. This is pop about pop, a record filled with songs that tweak or spin conventions, or are about the industry. Only a writer with a long, hard battle with the biz in his past could write “Music for Money” and much of Jesus of Cool does feel like a long-delayed reaction to the disastrous American debut of Brinsley Schwarz, where the band’s grand plans at kick-starting their career came crumbling down and pushed them into the pubs. Once there, the Brinsleys spearheaded the back-to-basics pub rock movement in England and as the years rolled on the band got loose, as did Lowe’s writing, which got catchier and funnier on the group’s last two albums, Nervous on the Road and New Favourites of Brinsley Schwarz.
[Click to read more of The Allmusic Blog » They Called It Rock: Nick Lowe’s Jesus of Cool Gets the Reissue This Pure Pop Classic Deserves]
