COLE,LLOYD - Guesswork (Sealed) (CD)

Some albums coalesce around a title. Lloyd Cole’s new album is one such record. Guesswork mirrors the uncertainty of the world as you enter your third act. Guesswork is consistent with a record whose protagonists seem reluctant to venture confidently beyond the moment. In terms of minutes, it’s his longest, but in terms of songs, it’s shorter than any of his previous eleven solo albums (fourteen if you count those he made with The Commotions). Guesswork is also his shortest in terms of total words sung. This might come as a surprise to those who primarily remember Lloyd for the precocious literary pop dispatches of 1984’s Rattlesnakes. However, for other onlookers who have followed his progress in the interim – taking in the muscular urban art-rock of his solo debut X (1990), the delicate digital folk of Music In A Foreign Language (2004) and a succession of electronic albums culminating in 2015’s 1D – that may be less so. Mostly constructed in his Massachusetts attic space, Lloyd’s first “songs” album since 2013’s universally acclaimed Standards sees him finally create a (mostly) electronic setting for his voice. “For a while,” he says, “it wasn’t clear if the project would ever come to fruition. I’ve been an electronic music fan since hearing Fripp and Eno’s No Pussyfooting when I was thirteen, Bowie’s Low and Iggy’s The Idiot at sixteen and then on to Kraftwerk… Eventually I had to make this record, but for several years mulling the idea the task seemed too much for me to take on alone. Finally I had to. And then I got help.”