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Elvis Costello's The Juliet Letters is one flying leap into alien territory. Here our tortured bard, inspired by the work of a Verona professor who collects letters addressed to Shakespeare's "Juliet Capulet," has written a set of missives that muse, highbrow-style, on the bitterness of love. And with his usual twisted sense of appropriateness, he's enlisted the Brodsky Quartet, a string quartet, to support him.
Alas, it's an overblown, self-righteous exercise. Pop-master Costello got the parlor-music ambience right, but faltered at the composer's bench: Instead of offering 20 tuneful meditations for his lofty, sometimes tortured lyrics, he's lost his sense of melody. Songs full of clever wordplay are saddled with drony recitative, the talky and unmelodic style of theater music. What should be a lark turns into a 62-minute marathon that moves in slow motion.
Costello's been threatening a "high art" play for years, and the best moments on The Juliet Letters (the chipper confessional "I Almost Had a Weakness" and "Jacksons, Monk and Rowe," a discussion of divorce, show that he's capable of moving beyond the constrictions of the pop song without sacrificing his trademark effusiveness.
But the less-successful moments transform Costello into a heap of whimpering sentimentality — "Don't try to find me, I'm not worth anything anymore / I am not leaving you with all your problems, the biggest one is me," Costello sings on "Dear Sweet Filthy World" — which even the adroit support of the Brodsky Quartet can't overcome.
And throughout, it's possible to detect a little Costello sneer It's as though he's using oft-retreaded Gilbert-and-Sullivan characterizations to scold those who want another Armed Forces, and to remind them that this music is good for them. That may be true, but he should lose the attitude.
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