Holly Cole – Temptation

Holly Cole approaches Temptation as an actress might approach a linked set of short scenes. Tom Waits provides the songs, but Cole does not borrow his voice or his street-corner mythology. With Aaron Davis at the piano and David Piltch on bass, she changes scale, gender and point of view, allowing melody and lyric to emerge through a trio language of close listening.

“Little Boy Blue” is reduced to a fragile nocturne, with the spaces around Cole’s vocal carrying as much weight as the notes. “Falling Down” moves through a darker pulse, while “Shiver Me Timbers” reveals the romantic longing beneath Waits’s weathered imagery. The instrumental “Frank’s Theme” gives Davis and Piltch room to shape atmosphere without a lyric. On “Tango Till They’re Sore,” the trio finds theatrical movement and dry humour, proving that restraint need not mean stillness. These choices give the album an arc distinct from a conventional tribute: characters enter, speak and vanish, but Cole’s perspective remains coherent.

This 45 RPM boxed edition places Temptation in a substantial collector’s format. The box presentation makes this version easy to distinguish from the album’s other physical editions and suits a sequence whose identity depends on the relationship between songs. Its complete dramatic arc deserves unhurried attention from beginning to end, especially as recurring moods acquire new meanings across the sequence. For Holly Cole collectors, it is a distinctive physical treatment of one of her most fully conceived songbook projects. Michael 45 keeps the set in Germany and dispatches it from Hilden, allowing customers to avoid arranging a personal US import and waiting for customs processing.

Customer question: Buying Analogue Productions records in Europe