Love Life
By Yahoo! Shopping User Aug 24, 2006
Pros: Everything
Cons: Nothing
Coming out within the golden age of Britpop, Lovelife has been considered a highlight to mention such a music style. With it, Lush have been one of the most typical Britpop bands with female vocals in the good old days; no matter how shoegazish the b...and had been before. Really, this is a good result of two brilliant women with guitars and two men playing drums and bass - together. Paralleling many bad reviews about the album's too much crafty and picking-negative-points-o
f-love lyrics (no one can refuse the fact that Miki sounds quite arrogant and egotistic here), good reviews for Lovelife have existed to give this girl-dominated band a thumbs up. Being an opening explosion to the album, 'Ladykillers' was first released as a catchy single, with melodic harmonies and a clearly ironic lyric about a ridiculous story with a man who called himself manipulative. In a similar way, all songs there which were used to make promos are kinda rapid-fire with clich guitars and beats. One of them, 'Single Girl' sounds like such a mess, lyrically, to everyone but who follow celibacism, like me. The different one, '500', on the other hand, is quite entertaining with its video. Also, 'Ciao!' - a duet singing with Jarvis from Pulp, is about an end-of-relationship, with an interesting conversation, in my own point of view -- Listen to it if you wanna forget your ex, or simply you've got problems with love; although I intuitionally think there's some widened meaning in it, with those lines "I know that you miss me really / Bet you wish that you still had me / You'll never find someone like me, but / I've got no regrets at all...". The less-noisy songs, mostly on the second half of the album, are quite 60's-influenced by quietly touching strings and acoustic sounds. For example, 'Papasan' is a small drumless song with a nice lyric, in comparison to Lush themselves, turning to grittier at the end, like most of Lush songs, though. 'Tralala' is another beautiful ballad melodically, though the words seem the opposite to it, like the way Lush always are. On the other side, Lush were more 'Lushy' in this second half - You'll meet some figures of 'Light from a Dead Star' or 'Hypocrite' in it - with the beautiful ending 'Olympia' - songs like that. If you first listen to Lush with this album, don't misconceive that Lush are exactly like that. As I said - they had been much more shoegazing before. About if they were better or worse, I leave the choice for you, cos it depends on which style you'd prefer, though Shoegazer is not very far from simple Alternative; I mean, at least, both words 'Shoegaze' and 'Britpop' are for British Indie bands only ;). Containing two singles standing in the top UK's 20 hits, the recording ended Lush's career in a nice way, somehow. Along with the fact that most Lush rather big fans - that I know - like this album least of all their beautiful ones, it got the highest ever rank in America for the band themselves - reaching the top US 200. Maybe their older stuffs had been just too British which probably had been hardly digestible enough for the Yankees, but anyways we should commend the album for its pop songs with catchy 'hooks' - possibly influenced by the 'britpop culture' which had dominated the UK in 1995 with tremendous successes named Oasis, Blur and Pulp. Listen to it to commemorate the bassist Chris Acland, who hanged himself in his parents' house by the end of the year - not long since the band had started gaining glories for their final work. More than that, listen to it to celebrate the great era when Britpop highly promoted itself, like I've been doing. "These could be the good old days..." Read more Less
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