>The Chicago Reader had a nice review/commentary on EC and >KOA several weeks
ago that's worth reading.

Here's the article.  I don't see much nice about it.  The author's take on
the self-referential nature of the songs just isn't the way I've always
experienced them.  Plus his attitude of EC's post B&C work, well, I don't
need to convince all of you that he's wrong.  Judge for yourselves.

Chicago Reader August 04, 1995
Hitsville by Bill Wyman

Elvis Costello
His aim used to be true

That Year's Model

 Elvis Costello cemented his reputation--and for intents and purposes ended
his artistic career--nine years ago by releasing, just months apart, King of
America and Blood & Chocolate.  The latter was a blast from the Attractions,
the violent trio who backed Costello from This Years Model on.  Impressive at
the time as a reassertion of his rock prowess, it now seems a bit light.
 King of America, on the other hand, just reissued in remastered form by
Rykodisc, has only grown in the intervening years.  The record's importance
lies in the way Costello, the first of the punks to cope with the dimunition
of the rage that fueled the music for years, unblinkingly addressed the havoc
that time was wreaking on the punk ethos.  King of America is not a concept
album: its deepest, most densely written son, "American Without Tears," has
nothing to do with this theme; it's a reverberating portrait of a pair of
female British expatriates.  Nor is the album perfect--limp rockabilly and
blues numbers like "The Big Light" and "Eisenhower Blues" are there only to
illuminate the backing band, the Confederates, composed of T-Bone Burnette
and members of Elvis Presley's TCB backup ensemble.  But it is a
self-concious masterpiece of obsessions on doubt and decline.

 The album is built around the opening title track and a closing suite of
three songs, "Jack of All Parades," "Suit of Lights," and "Sleep of the
Just."  Spiced throughout with Costello's darkest, severest wordplay, they
are united in thematically probing Costello's stardom, or lack of it, over a
decade of wide critical acclaim.  His analysis is bleak.  Stardom is defined
alternately as "a trick they do with mirrors and with chemicals" or, in the
form of a Madonna pinup, fodder for the masturbatory fantasies of the masses:
"All the soldiers taking turns with their attentions."  His career is waning:
"I wish that I could push a button / And talk in the past and not the present
tense."  Rock has lost its malevolent force: "I went to work last night and
wasted my breath."  He surmises darkly that he will be celebrated
posthumously: "They pulled him out of the cold cold ground / And put him in a
suit of lights."

 King of America 's sound, driven by acoustic guitars and piano, is rugged
and sprawling, as open as a prairie.  Costello underlined the album's sweep
and scope with an epic tour that year.  Major cities saw a series of three
shows: on night one he and the Attractions coursed through Blood & Chocolate
and their previous tough glories; on the second he and the Confederates
played King of America  and various rootsy excavations (a sample of this is
caught--nicely but somewhat irrelevantly--in a bonus disc, Live on Broadway
1986, issued in the first batch of King of America  reissues); the third
show, dubbed the "Amazing Singing Songbook," featured Costello and the
Attractions playing randomly selected songs from their years together.
 Critics at the time stretched to fit the nights into a "past, present, and
future" format.  How obvious it seems today that the correct parallel was
past, past, and past.  Indeed the work Costello would give us in the years
since--unconcerned product like Spike and Mighty Like a Rose,  monstrous
collaborative experiments with the likes of the Broadsky Quartet, and most
pathetically, a reunion with the Attractions last year--would be flaccid
imitations of his vibrant early work.  We know it now, he knew it then.