It is almost 30 years since Nick Lowe's album Jesus of Cool which featured such classic songs as Marie Provost about the Hollywood star who died in her apartment alone with her unfed dog ("She was a winner, she became the doggy's dinner").
Lowe always had a wrysense of humour - he called one release The Bowi EP after David Bowie released the album Low - and it is still evident on his new album At My Age in which he addresses the concerns (some fanciful) of middle age.
He's come a long way since the British pub rock bands of the punk and post-punk era, and in the 90s gradually moved towards classic American country with the likes of Ry Cooder.
His album Dig My Mood of 1998 was a minor but largely ignored classic. He inevitably linked up with the legendary song-writing team of Spooner Oldham and Dan Penn which only deepened his own writing.
This new album exudes effortless melodicism and confirms his place in the pantheon of great American-country singers and songwriters. The title is deliberately revealing: here are songs of regret for lost love; others about bitterness; some about being happy with life and a new love; others just about being ... well, being his age.
He covers Charlie Feathers' The Man In Love, but it is his own songs like I Trained Her To Love Me which has an undercurrent of self-loathing beneath the braggadocio, and the reflective ballad The Other Side of the Coin which make this an outstanding collection of country soul and softly swinging jazz-blues.
Label: Proper/Southbound
Verdict: His British pub rock days long gone, the former Jesus of Cool is a dapper country star.
* For Graham Reid's reviews of albums by Richard Thompson, Teddy Thompson and Brett Dennen go to elsewhere.co.nz
