Review of Costello And Nieve 4-CD Box Set
Salon, 1996-12-09
- Stephanie Zacharek


Costello's new live CD set captures lightning in a box 

            "Costello & Nieve" 
        Elvis Costello and Steve Nieve 
              Warner Bros 

       By STEPHANIE ZACHAREK 

there's a rare meteorological phenomenon, the
subject of both a Jules Verne novel and the Eric
Rohmer movie "Summer," that depends on an
unlikely confluence of perfect weather conditions
and the alertness of the viewer. It's called the
green ray: if all the conditions are just right, and if
you're watching attentively at just the right
moment from just the right vantage point, you'll
see a sliver of green light right at the horizon, in
the instant the very top of the sun slips below the
edge of the world. You can see the ray for
yourself at the end of "Summer" - Rohmer
filmed sunset after sunset trying to catch it,
delaying completion of the film for months - and
that luminous split-second of film is Rohmer's
greatest gift to us: a chance to experience
(second-hand, on film, but why quibble?)
something that we might not have the patience, or
the luck, to catch for ourselves. "Summer" is a
miracle of packaging: at its heart is a magic
moment, just for us. 

Can you put a green ray - a mysterious and rare
confluence of just the right conditions - in a box?
Because if it's at all possible, Elvis Costello and
Steve Nieve have come damn near in "Costello &
Nieve," a limited-edition five-EP CD set of live
recordings made in five American cities last May.
Live recordings from Costello are a rarity -
there are scatterings of live tracks, but until now,
his only full LP of live material was 1978's
promo-only "Live at the El Mocambo" (finally
reissued a few years back on the Rykodisc box
set "Two and a Half Years"). 

But it's not just the scarcity of live material from
Costello that makes "Costello & Nieve" so
wonderful. Live records, even by amazing
performers, are so often disappointing. Fans
treasure the live Costello shows they've seen,
polishing them up in their memories like worry
stones - the last thing they want is a live record
to smash the magic. But "Costello & Nieve"
actually preserves it. Costello and Attractions
keyboardist Nieve play to and for each other as
well as to us, talking to each other musically with
the off-hand ease of scrappy brothers who might
rassle each other to the ground one minute and
share their deepest, darkest secrets with each
other the next. The arrangements, many of which
feel improvised even if they're not, give the
performers lots of breathing room: many of them
are built around nothing more than Nieve's
resonant piano and Costello's broken-blossom
vocals; others also feature Costello's guitar, and
Attractions drummer Pete Thomas guests on a
few tracks. 

The songs are so pared down, so intimate, they
almost make for supper-club music, and yet
there's also something virile - almost feral -
about them. On the most delicate songs - a
meltingly tender "My Funny Valentine," from the
Paradise, in Boston, for instance - Costello's
voice shivers in the space where elegance and
heartbreak intersect, like the lonely, exquisite note
that shudders off a tuning fork. The fiercest songs
hold nothing back. On "Watching the Detectives,"
from the Park West, in Chicago, guitar and piano
trade phrases as if they were following each other
into dark corners. Costello bounces flat,
percussive webs of sound off his strings, like the
ominous blips of an EKG. Nieve unfurls rippling
runs that crash into shards, but manages to tuck a
sunny, pastel fragment from the standard "I'll
Remember April" amid the chaos. 

Maybe most important, "Costello & Nieve" gives
us a snapshot of one of contemporary pop's most
valuable singers at the top of his game. These
past few years, while longtime fans were busy
complaining (wrongly) that Costello wasn't writing
songs as good as "Alison" anymore, he's turned
into a first-rate song stylist, working his
compositions from the inside out to show us more
depth, subtlety, and unvarnished beauty than he's
ever given us before. 

Here (and on his most recent album, the stunning
"All This Useless Beauty," the songs from which
provide the backbone of these live recordings),
Costello sounds more disciplined than ever, but
instead of flattening out the contours of his voice,
his hard work has given it more texture and extra
dimensions. He seems better able than ever to
summon those fleeting shades of feeling -of
despair, elation, or bewilderment -that usually
pass over us before we can even name them. On
his cover of Burt Bacharach and Hal David's "I
Just Don't Know What to Do With Myself" (from
the Troubadour, in Los Angeles), he works his
way from half-soothing, sandy tones that suggest
emotional self-control to a half-strangled,
spontaneous cry of frustration. By the time he
reaches the pinnacle line "Don't know what else
to do/I'm still so crazy for you," he seems to be
standing alone at the center of the song. 

And over and over again, you hear Costello
reaching out, eager to find new ways of doing old
material and never seeming to struggle with it. On
the shambling, majestic "Man Out of Time" (also
from the Troubadour show), he asks the song's
central, repeated question - "Will you still love a
man out of time?" - a little differently each time,
changing the phrasing as if he were turning a
diamond this way and that to let it catch the light.
Costello's search for the exact, right way to sing
the line is just one example of how "Costello &
Nieve," as permanent as it is (you've got all five
discs right there in front of you, after all), captures
the fleeting quality of live performance. There's
something evanescent and more than a little
wistful about these songs - they slide toward
their own vanishing point almost before we're
ready to let them go. While we're listening,
though, they're a sliver of light suspended across
the expanse of five 20-minute discs - just long
enough to impress themselves on our memory, but
not so long that we can even begin to take them
for granted. 



Stephanie Zacharek is a regular contributor to Salon.
She was fortunate enough to see the Boston
performance captured on "Costello & Nieve."