Behind the spry banter and self deprecating puns, raffish singer-songwriter Nick Lowe displays an intimate familiarity with life in the gutter. Lowe draws from the same dystopian wellspring as socialist film-makers Ken Loach and Mike Newell. Populated by drop-outs and dole-heads, his songs evoke images of crumbling tower blocks and rain flecked industrial wastelands.
Alas, Lowe's neo-Dickensian invective doesn't always translate into memorable music. Plodding chord changes and limp country-blues arrangements cast a dreary pall. His tart urban poetry too often suffers for want of an aching melody or heart rending chord change.
Opener There Will Never Be Any Peace until God is at the Conference Table underscored the flaws in Lowe's writing. Its anti-war sentiments are timely and keenly observed. Yet tacked to a woodenly orthodox structure, they come across as woolly liberal sentimentalising.
This lack of ambition is mystifying because Lowe is obviously capable of better. Dusting down a back catalogue straddling three decades, he gave us a sweet, winsome Man That I've Become, and a serrated I Love the Sound of Breaking Glass.
It all goes slightly wobbly when he turns to his current album, the stolid, rather luke-warm The Convincer. Like some ghastly, freshly exhumed show-band frontman, Lowe totters through the saccharine Lately I've Left Things Slide and flesh creeplingly impersonates an undead Cockney Elvis on Cupid Must be Angry. Lowe's beefy backing band struggled spiritedly against the swelling tide of bathos.
Busy keyboards and brisk slide guitar created an intoxicating sepia ambience. But Lowe's compositions, so steeply rooted in the mundane, cannot transcend their pub rock origins.