Lou Reed – ‘Coney Island Baby’
The ways of Lou Reed are hard to reconcile. To see the swaggering king of misanthropy and artistic danger suddenly standing camp as Christmas in a mime outfit with half his face shyly covered by a pert little top hat on the album cover of Coney Island Baby is almost more perturbing than some of his intentionally shocking artwork efforts.
The first track carries this strange aura even further. ‘Crazy Feeling’ is a bit of a ditty with a sweet piece of Eagles-like slide guitar. That is not how Lou Reed starts albums. So, once again, the measured nature of the melodious song is subverted by expectation; you imagine that at any point, the “crazy feeling” will turn out to be something pathological, but in the end, it oozes out and even finishes with a Beach Boys imitation final chord flourish.
Now, you imagine things are surely set to get sinister, and Reed will pull the rug out from under us, but the rug only gets more cushioned. If the final chord of the opener took things in a beach-based direction, then ‘Charley’s Girl’ chucks out the deckchair and slaps on the factor 50. But on this occasion, you can settle into the luscious riff a little further, and its crisp hook is harder not to get snared on than a fly in a web on a David Attenborough documentary.
While this is now how you expect the typically ambitious songwriter to operate, there is something about the melodic ease of ‘Charley’s Girl’ that proves effortlessly appreciable. At this stage, the Coney Island Baby title seems apt in a sincere sense. The record is one of youthful reverie, a dainty piece of indie that ventures back down memory lane with all the sepia-toned airbrushing that nostalgia brings, and Reed is happy to leave his more acerbic tropes on the outbound ferry.
This is a record of young love and the tones are sanguine, and the words are saccharine by design. This, in turn, makes it no less literary than something like Berlin. So, while it might seem rather unambitious on the surface, when he pelts out his affecting vocals on ‘She’s My Best Friend’ with that epic reverbing bass tone grooving along underneath, you tap your toe and smile, realising that not everything has to be dark to be artful.
However, a leopard can’t change their spots forever, and at ‘Kicks’, you wonder whether Reed has grown bored of the concept as he finds himself in the middle of some guitar noodling tedium reminiscent of punk improv. Thankfully, these moments are fleeting, and once again, a touch of humour comes back into the sunny record as his sense of groove shines as it does throughout his discography.
With blues-infused tones wavering into proceedings and the odd bit of punk implying that he simply can’t help himself, the intent of Coney Island Baby might be to be sweet, but Reed isn’t able to withhold his true colours for long enough to make this the daydream that it could be. Instead, you’re left with a record that happily offers up an array of lovely little riffs, brilliant bits of billowing bass, and a few tunes of poppy perfection that you will go back to; however, the trip to Coney Island isn’t one you’re often implored to make.
Much like the cover warned, you just can’t be sure of the place, what it is meant to be, what it says, and whether a patch of cloud like ‘Kicks’ will come and put a dampener on things. You’ll have a pleasant time there, but it just won’t live in the memory quite like that trip to Berlin.
