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June 10, 2005
After they shed their winter coats...
Graham Coxon - Hard + Slow
There was a time, many years ago, when Graham Coxon could do no wrong, at least in my opinion. Let me set the stage here a little: Back in the Fall of '99, Blur's 13 had just come out, the monumentally cool video for 'Coffee + TV' (Coxon likes those binary titles) was in semi-rotation on MTV2, and Q magazine said that Coxon was the second most original guitarist in Britain, right behind Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood. Then there was talk of a Graham solo album, supposedly influenced by his love of American hardcore and indie music. I rabidly anticipated it, and bought the hell out of it when it first appeared on CD Now (which was still an actual separate-from-Amazon entity back then).
"The Sky Is Too High" was sort of a revelation. I had never really listened to anything that sounded so rough, or personal, or cold. There is something about this record that is all about chilly, misty mornings and waking up feeling alienated from the things you enjoy. However, having said that, I'm pretty sure Graham is going straight for a wooing on 'Hard + Slow', albeit a wooing that contains a chinese woodblock solo(!)- but what girl wouldn't like that, really? Graham wrangles the same kind of delightful patterns and phrases out of his acoustic guitar as he ever did with his electric, and this song ends up feeling like a casual little masterpiece. You can buy any of GC's releases right here (Happiness in Magazines is also quite good).
Posted by Kevin at June 10, 2005 11:11 AM
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