Graham Coxon - Love Travels at Illegal Speeds

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After a string of solo albums as side projects, Graham Coxon enters his sixth as only his second after being a member of Blur. While ex-bandmate Damon Albarn may be drawing the most attention for his Gorillaz group and electronic/trip-hop work, Coxon direction remains on what brought him here: Britpop with loud guitars.

Coxon main role is guitarist, and he still is admirable. He performs all the instruments on the album, and it's hard to complain. As a singer, he does a good job even if you could replace him with a dozen other British singers and it wouldn't do much of a difference.

Coxon recalls punk-pop in the pre-Blink 182 era - it's fun and loud and catchy but not stupid. "I Can't Look At Your Skin" is a good example of this, a catchy, high-energy song with a pretty cool guitar lead. Then, on track 4, "Just A State of Mind" he slows down. Quite thankfully, Coxon delivers pretty solidly on these as well.

But the real point of the album are the rocking numbers like "Gimme Some Love". Despite this, some of the slower songs are needed or else it would get rather redundant.

Unsuprisingly, the lyrics in "Love Travels at Illegal Speeds" deal with love, and all aspects of it. Of course, 9 out of 10 songs ever written are about some form of love, so it's quite easy to fall into cliche. Coxon falls into a lot of cliches, but thankfully he doesn't repeat them very often. Some songs are pretty cliche but they are sung with enough feeling and with good enough music to excuse the lyrics - "What's He Got?" is a pretty good example of this.

The album doesn't have a lot of suprising turns. It's mostly all pretty solid Britpop. And it may be for the better - sure it's not much but britpop-punk, but it's good at what it does.

Fans of Blur will probably enjoy this, and fans of Coxon's previous solo work will no doubt like it (it's probably Coxon's best solo album to date). People looking for a good, energetic and catchy bit of Britpop will surely be satisfied. Just don't expect that much else, because it's not much else. And really, why should it be?

- Luis