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Costello & Toussaint CD Review
Steve Forstneger
Elvis Costello & Allen Toussaint
The River In Reverse
(Verve Forecast)
This anticipated ode to New Orleans stirs the soul of the city, though The Angry Young Man’s voice often gets in the way.
Costello is so proficient at a bowl full of genres, he’s lucky to have an asset to tie it all together as him. Unfortunately, his nasal whine is it. Yelling rampantly over music penned mostly by NOLA’s bedrock tunesmith Allen Toussaint, it’s often difficult to grasp the earthy spirits haunting the tracks. Behind the boards, Joe Henry directs Costello, Toussaint, The Imposters, and The Crescent City Horns into a faintly safe mixture of blues and gospel, one that could use a little more than Steve Nieve’s B3 organ to provide texture. Aside from the chain-gang prayer of the Toussaint-sung “Who’s Gonna Help Brother Get Further?” River In Reverse feels mainly like a standardized Costello project (he wrote only one of the songs by himself and lo, it’s the title track). It’s solid and not likely to disappoint Elvis fans, but maybe it should have been built to appeal to more than one peer group.
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