Review of When I Was Cruel - "cause for celebration"
Daily Telegraph, 2002-04-13
- David Cheal

 

Elvis Costello When I Was Cruel

FIRST, the good news: after a series of intriguing and often highly successful collaborative albums in a gamut of genres, Elvis Costello has released his first album on his own behalf for seven years, and it contains a couple of songs that are as good as anything he has ever done. There are also some stunning vocal performances, deranged brass arrangements, and a return to the kind of raw rock'n'roll with which he was pinning audiences against the back walls of sweaty venues 25 years ago. The bad news? Well, there isn't a great deal; mostly that, as with his live shows, he doesn't seem to know when to stop, thus delivering a disc that at 68 minutes is probably a couple of songs too long (Daddy Can I Turn This? in particular seems to serve no other purpose than to show that he can still rock out). Also - and this, too, is a quibble - the brass arrangement on 15 Petals is so extraordinary in its fusion of jazz phrasing and Indian wedding band exuberance, the track should have been left as an instrumental, rather than featuring a superfluous vocal track. The up-there-with-the-best-of-them songs are Tart, on which Costello shows off his exquisite sense of lyrical rhythm, and the epic Alibi, on which his voice ranges from a husky croon to a desperate holler. That there are tunes of such quality still popping out of his head is a cause for celebration.