Coles Corner is the fourth studio album from English pop/rock musician Richard Hawley, released on 5 September 2005 in the UK and the following day in the US. The title immortalises the legendary Sheffield landmark Coles Corner, a popular meeting place of old and new lovers. The album was nominated for the 2006 Mercury Music Prize for best album.
Critics were almost unanimous in their praise for Coles Corner. AllMusic said that "early rock & roll and rockabilly, country, traces of the vintage-'40s pop, jazz, and even some blues, fall together in a seamless, nearly rapturous whole... Coles Corner is glorious, magical, and utterly lovely in its vision, articulation, and execution".[2]PopMatters stated that "Coles Corner heads full-bore into the vintage sounds of five decades ago... It takes a certain flair for a modern-day artist to pull off such a retro sound, and Hawley's complete lack of irony and bombast on this record makes it work... It's certainly not uncommon for contemporary artists to mine the past and successfully corner the ever-growing adult contemporary market... but none of those youngsters can match the style and grace with which Richard Hawley crafts his music. It's achingly beautiful, disarmingly intimate, simply the best-kept secret in popular music today."[8]The Guardian called the tracks "old-fashioned, lovelorn, immaculately produced songs" and said "[Hawley's] third album follows the template of its predecessors... if there is a difference it's in the richness of the emotions and textures".[3]Mojo called it "a glorious melange of love, loss, regret, homesickness and romance".[4]Pitchfork said "Coles Corner is unapologetically retro to the max but it works... Hawley resides deep inside this material, writing songs with the melodic muscle to stand up next to standards... you realize that Hawley's music can go wherever he wants it to go. He's not stuck in the past. He inhabits his record collection because he likes it there and has a feeling we will too. He's right."[7]
MusicOMH felt that if there were any reservations it was that "many Hawley songs are interchangeable" and "apart from the title track itself – which really is a cracker – there isn't anything in this album we didn't hear in the first two. It's still gorgeous, though."[12]
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