Review of When I Was Cruel
Salon, 2002-04-30
- Ira Robbins
When he was cruel
It used to be easier for Elvis Costello to write good rock songs. On
his newest album, this angry young man really isn't either.
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By Ira Robbins
April 30, 2002 | Mick Jagger had a point when he announced "it's
the singer not the song" -- the young Rolling Stones were perfectly
content to beg, borrow and steal material their charisma machine could
strut to. The songs of Bob Dylan, which at first were his career, are
now reshaped nightly in performance by an artful renderer. And as a
singer, Paul McCartney has never been anything but the lucky sod who
gets first crack at all of Paul McCartney's compositions.
Elvis Costello has to have it both ways. He's a true singer-songwriter
who respects both ends of that hyphen. For years, live and on record,
this overachieving dynamo of lyrical and melodic invention took pains
to serve up his bitter words with the choler of the freshly wounded.
Later, when he outgrew rock to face the setting sun of pop gone by,
he looked up Burt Bacharach to author a songbook of standards all his
own. He didn't stop there. Without renouncing the excesses of his past,
Elvis has become a subtle master of virtually any genre he fancies singing.
In 1993, answering a plea for one original tune from 15-minute British
pop star Wendy James, Elvis banged out an album's worth in a weekend,
scraps of brilliance delivered with the evident effort of a waiter clearing
a table of spilled caviar. So inept was her handling of this bounty
(no Jagger she), it largely escaped notice that E.C., in his distinctive
and compelling style, had provided gimmicks and retreads -- more than
adequate to her needs, but nothing he'd be bothered to sing on his own
records. Had he kept them, other than a few standouts the songs might
have made useful B sides, bonus tracks or shelf-sitters awaiting that
extra jolt of ambition. Maybe artists as talented as Costello have trouble
gauging the creative exertion each project demands. Maybe the line separating
genius from hubris is hard to hold over time.
Writing songs for Wendy James was one of a sequence of events that
led Costello to reconvene the Attractions -- the supple English trio
that abetted Elvis's many moods until his need for new challenges became
overwhelming in the mid-'80s -- for the potently invigorated "Brutal
Youth" in 1994. Since then, Costello has primarily explored the
land beyond rock, in collaboration with Bacharach, jazz guitarist Bill
Frisell, opera star Anne Sofie von Otter and others.
All of this makes "When I Was Cruel" -- which begins brashly
with "45," an acknowledgment of the artist's advancing age
that cleverly fits 7-inch vinyl and the war years under the same numerical
heading -- a significant test of Costello's ability to reinsert himself
into the world he willingly (and not unwisely) left behind. If the preceding
era didn't exactly spoil Costello for rock, it did leave that part of
his muse a bit out of whack. "When I Was Cruel" is no great
late addition to a brilliant career, no sudden burst of creativity in
unexplored realms. "Stop me if you've heard this before,"
he sings in the cloying, overlong "Alibi," and those familiar
with his work of the '80s will surely detect echoes of those years in
nearly every song here.
The most compelling tunes, "Tear Off Your Own Head (It's a Doll
Revolution)" and "My Little Blue Window," recycle the
past to delightful effect, but that shouldn't be the best that can be
said of a new album by an artist of Costello's caliber. In the shadow
of a catalog containing such taut earthmovers as "She's filing
her nails while they're dragging the lake," "Sometimes I think
that love is just a tumor/ You've got to cut it out" and "Your
mind is made up but your mouth is undone," there's not much to
say about mundane choruses like "15 petals/ One for every year
I spent with you/ Jewels and precious metals will never do" or
"Well I believe we just/ Become a speck of dust."
The presence of keyboard player Steve Nieve and drummer Pete Thomas
(who never got full credit for the tension and power of Costello's early
records) only commits the Elvis youth reclamation project deeper to
the past tense. (Davey Faragher, a veteran of Cracker and John Hiatt's
band, does the Bruce Thomas bass parts here.) Singing with unabashed
vigor, gamely chucking up doses of aggressive guitar distortion and
a spot of squalling harmonica, Costello gives the old days another go.
But other than testing his own mettle -- for whatever that's worth to
someone who's written with Bacharach, covered Charles Mingus and sung
for Tony Bennett -- what's it for?
There's more wrong here than the inevitable maturation of a no-longer-angry
middle-aged man. No one is going to attack a happily married fella for
loving his wife and singing about it. In his pop-crooner mode, love
and loss are the language spoken, and a cutting remark would be gauche,
but writing rock songs again sets him in competition with some of the
smartest, most trenchant music ever written and recorded. The iceberg
tipped by the euphoric rush of "Lipstick Vogue," "Pump
It Up" and "Radio Radio" is a massive obstacle for this
album to navigate. If the performances here reclaimed the sputtering,
spastic fury of Elvis and the Attractions in their prime, it might not
matter that Costello came to play without indelible melodies and jaw-dropping
lyrics, but they really don't and he largely did.
The album's charms, which do exist, are slow to emerge. The seductively
personal and disarmingly serious lawyer plaint "Soul for Hire"
is sparely arranged with scraping sound effects to offset the vocal
syncopation; "Daddy Can I Turn This" is oblique and ominous;
"Radio Silence" is a solemnly played current-events coda in
the vein of "Shipbuilding" or "Pills and Soap."
But "When I Was Cruel" drifts more than it drives, jumping
stylistic periods, with forced, graceless hooks and the sort of rote
character studies ("Spooky Girlfriend," "Tart")
his pop life might have rendered obsolete. "Dust 2 ..." and
"... Dust" split one sentimental idea in two for no-waiting
déjà entendu. While Costello is too smart for self-parody,
"Episode of Blonde," with its lunatic lyrics and patches of
Dylan shtick, comes mighty close, and "Dissolve" is essentially
"5ive Gears in Reverse" without a melody. Even the album's
centerpiece, "When I Was Cruel No. 2," stretches the gripping
atmos-noir of "Watching the Detectives" into a lengthy bore.
Endurance presents a different challenge in rock than it does in jazz,
blues or pop. Physicality, youthful allure and creative momentum are
less relevant to the aging titans of those musics than to rockers struggling
to beat the clock. Credible artistic careers of 30 or 40 years, the
rule in many realms, are the exception in rock. Costello's reinvention
as a vocalist was a prudent move, and this belated attempt to have it
both ways is proof. If he hasn't lost the ability to rock with conviction,
at the very least he's shown that it's no longer a simple matter of
choice. "It was so much easier when I was cruel," he sings,
and he's undoubtedly right.
Copyright 2002 Salon.com