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Taking Liberties, Elvis Costello's new Columbia album, isn't going to endear Mr. Costello to people who think he's already taken too many liberties.
On his previous LP, Get Happy!!!, Mr. Costello crammed 20 songs onto a single disk, and while some of the performances and arrangements were carefully polished, others had the rough immediacy of a songwriter's demonstration record. Taking Liberties presents 20 more songs, and again the performances and arrangements run the gamut from processed to raw. But Get Happy!!! was a coherent album, with a characteristic sound and style of its own, while Taking Liberties is a collection of tracks from various stages of Mr. Costello's career.
The one thing the performances included on the album have in common is that they haven't appeared on any of Mr. Costello's American albums. Some are the B-sides of singles and some are selections from English EP's or LP's. Some are worth having, and some might as well have stayed on the shelf.
The only real classic in the collection is "(I Don't Want to Go to) Chelsea," which was previously available in the United States on the soundtrack album from the film Americathon and which most of Mr. Costello's fans probably own. There are several interesting tracks that Mr. Costello produced and recorded as a kind of one-man band — "Ghost Train," for example, and his surprisingly straightforward version of the Rodgers and Hart "My Funny Valentine." "Getting Mighty Crowded," a Van McCoy tune, is another of Mr. Costello's stylish, energetic soul excursions, and it wouldn't have sounded out of place on Get Happy!!! Two songs, the very early "Radio Sweetheart" and "Stranger in the House," are closer to pure country and western balladry than anything on Mr. Costello's albums.
More questionable are the two alternate versions of songs from Get Happy!!!, neither of which is as effective as the version originally released, and Mr. Costello's "Girls Talk," which was first recorded by Dave Edmunds. To this listener, Mr. Edmunds made the tune his own, and Mr. Costello's performance of it is as superfluous as Linda Ronstadt's. Several other songs, among them "Talking in the Dark" (which pinches the organ break from the Beatles's "Penny Lane") and "Dr. Luther's Assistant," are simply second-rate.
Despite these and a few other lapses, the quality of the album's music is generally pretty high. But Taking Liberties doesn't hang together particularly well as an album, principally because the performances are drawn from various sessions and because the backing and arrangements aren't consistent from track to track. Get Happy!!! worked because the songs seemed to belong to a particular time and place, and because Mr. Costello's band, the Attractions, enforced a certain stylistic unity. Taking Liberties doesn't transcend its original premise; it's a collection of odds and ends, no more and no less. Columbia says Mr. Costello will have an album of new material ready early next year and that he'll probably be performing in America again then. Meanwhile, Taking Liberties offers bargain-basement Costello at big-store prices.
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