Review of North
International Herald Tribune, 2003-09-24
- Mike Zwerin

 

Real music on record

Mike Zwerin IHT
Wednesday, September 24, 2003

PARIS It's good to be reminded that record companies are still sometimes willing to recycle some of the profits they make from marketing over-priced garbage back into real music.

Elvis Costello's new album, "North," (Deutsche Grammophon) will put an end to the faux post-modern cliché that nobody writes good pop songs anymore. These are all love songs, and the reader should know that he is famously in love with a famous singer to understand lines like:

Let me tell you about her The way that she makes me feel Then draw a curtain on this scene I can't reveal.

Sitting in a leased limo in front of an office building on Faubourg St. Antoine, Costello avoided referring to the object of his affection except indirectly with groans about "the tabloids." He is one of those rare figures in pop music (Frank Sinatra was another) whose work there's no reason to dislike no matter who you are or where you are coming from. He has written lyrics to Charles Mingus compositions and his collaborators have included Paul McCartney, Gunther Schuller, Burt Bacharach, Chet Baker and Johnny Cash.

The songs on "North" are somewhere between Schubert, Kurt Weill, John Lennon and Costello's favorite standards, such as "Here's That Rainy Day." He said that, while keeping "some semblance of the music I started with," he would like to "expand the definition of an art song," and that being on a respected classical music record label is helpful to the upgrade.

So-called power ballads with one-syllable words, moronic chords, tinny beats, overblown crescendos and muscle-bound modulations created by slick technology are à la mode. Costello's songs are the anti-power ballad. Harmonically, structurally and melodically subtle, they are performed by human beings and include upper partials and odd intervals not easily heard by everybody. Arguably, they are more interesting musically than verbally, a rarity in pop music. Costello spent more than a year writing the songs for "North," and he has taken the time and made the effort to learn how to write the arrangements ("with a pencil") for the chamber orchestra backing him (Lee Konitz and Lew Soloff solo). He conducts the orchestra, and his piano accompaniment is better than it needs to be. A good bet for a Grammy.