One of pop music's unreliable narrators offers discomfort. (But can you trust him?)

https://www.npr.org/2023/06/22/ [login to see] /lloyd-cole-on-pain-review
Let's pour out a Gatsby-sized glass of claret for the unreliable narrator. From that novel's Nick Carraway to Euphoria's Rue, slippery voices infuse modern life's emblematic stories with the hangover-inducing scent of its most treasured afflictions: ambiguity and ambivalence. Lloyd Cole, who came onto the pop scene as the resident brainiac of early 1980s U.K. jangle pop, has been writing unreliable narratives since those days. "A girl needs a gun these days, hey, on account of all the rattlesnakes," he sang in the Joan Didion-inspired ode to shaky heroines that was his band the Commotions' biggest hit.

Forty years later, Cole's new album finds him still exploring that hazy space where people question themselves, make excuses and promises and ponder the least destructive next move. On Pain, a well-calibrated mix of fleshed-out narratives and evocative set pieces, suits a time when even the weather doesn't seem to know what to do.