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The term "New Wave" has been tagged by journalists onto any new artistic movement which they cannot readily characterize. If there is any contemporary musician who evades simplistic categorization, it is Elvis Costello. Taking Liberties is his most diverse album so far by its very nature: a compilation of B-sides and other material not widely released in the states. For those of you who have shied away from Elvis in the past, this is the ideal album to get aquainted with the master of today's angst-ridden musicians.
The mediocrity of the seventies could not help but force some unique talent to emerge and buoy itself above the insincerity and aimlessness that represents the majority of popular placebo music. In 1977, Elvis appeared in the guise of the intelligent misogynist with all the trappings of a cultural miscarriage. In an era of libido rock and saccharine disco, Elvis became the heir apparent to the burden of rock-and-roll tradition. Elvis is the first serious Zeitgeist musician we have had since the Beatles and the Stones and the only one who aspires to overcome their reputations.
The twenty songs on this album represent an eclectic genius who takes his audaciousness seriously. Not content with only gratuitous rebellion, his aim is truly realized in every song he writes. That he can retain his integrity and still produce the most entertaining sounds in ten years (I am counting from the summer of love to 1977) attests to the thought and pain behind his apparent recklessness.
Elvis Costello's music is as tightly structured as his lyrics are biting. There is a cohesiveness to his compositions lacking in most so-called "New Wave" selections. From the bitter realities of being male in "Girls Talk" ("I've got a loaded imagination being fired by girls talk.") to his masturbation ethics ("Black and White World"). to his beautifully melodic lamentation "Just a Memory," Elvis not only puts his heart on his sleeve, he forcefeeds it to you.
"Night Rally" lapses into a paranoid chorus, stops abruptly, and then delightfully shifts into "Stranger in the House," a country-western tune that is painfully sober. Elvis is excitingly eclectic: "Getting Mighty Crowded" is danceable rhythm and blues, "Radio Sweetheart" is ironically melodic, and "Hoover Factory" is a short masterwork of defeatist logic presented in a mock-improvisational style.
The most beautiful song on the album is possibly "My Funny Valentine." Elvis has taken a sentimental old rogers and Hart song and made it hauntingly effective.
If Costello is the most exciting popular musician today, it is because he has taken his liberated stylistics seriously and used them to cogently express his unique personality and perceptive intelligence. His is a cruel mirror, but a human one; and he presents it to the world with more exhiliration than anyone else today.
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