Phoenix New Times, August 1, 1996

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All This Useless Beauty

Elvis Costello and the Attractions

Serene Dominic

In his sleeve notes for this year's Goodbye Cruel World reissue, Elvis Costello congratulated us for purchasing his worst album ever. He was good to his word — until recently, that messy aberration was the substandard bearer for Costello's extensive body of work. But now we have this smug, overwrought jumble.

Like Goodbye, Costello's new recording succeeds only in squandering the considerable talents of the greatest backing band ever kept on retainer, the fiery Attractions. Elvis' favorite studio hacks could've sleepwalked through the listless tracks here and it wouldn't have made a dot of difference. Songs don't fade out on Beauty so much as they collapse from collective lethargy.

Long before the Silverchair lads were even born, Costello burst on the pop scene like a COD letter bomb, promising he'd kill himself before witnessing his artistic decline. But somewhere along the way, he succumbed to the conceited elitism he once lambasted Yes and ELP for exhibiting. At their most impenetrable, early Elvis songs seemed like mischievous riddles. But for some time now, Costello has seemed far too enamored of his own vocabulary to give the common bloke anything to hang his own feelings on.

Listening to All This Useless Beauty, one gets the feeling Costello swallowed a thesaurus. The opening track alone catalogues a telescope, a bamboo needle and a shellac of Chopin into some abstraction of human emotion. It's as if he's following a recipe for commercial suicide, opening his album with a trio of dreary dirges, the worst of which sounds like a commercial for a cold-capsule medicine ("Little Atoms").

Fortunately, Costello is too savvy to turn in a thoroughly "useless" album. "Distorted Angel," a track originally intended for his group's excellent 1994 reunion album Brutal Youth, sounds like it can stand with Costello and the Attractions' best work. Ditto for "You Bowed Down," the "Turn, Turn, Turn"-inspired track originally written by Roger McGuinn.

But the highlights here are fewer than any album bearing Costello's name since Clambake. "I've given you the awful truth, now give me my rest," Costello whimpers on Beauty's somber finale, "I Want to Vanish."

After suffering this disappointment of an album, you almost feel compelled to introduce Costello to David Copperfield and grant that fondest wish. Poof! Begone, most clever song scribe!

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Phoenix New Times, August 1, 1996


Serene Dominic reviews All This Useless Beauty.


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