Mentioning Elvis Costello is a great conversation stopper these days. People grow fidgety, try to change the subject, or go to the kitchen for another tumbler of airplane fuel. After Get Happy, that dense, involuted record no one could make much sense of, the prevailing sentiment is that Costello has plunged headlong into esoterica.
Taking Liberties, a 20-song collection of B-sides and EP cuts, serves the double function of putting Costello into much clearer focus and making all those 45s I painstakingly collected nearly worthless. Almost all the loose ends of his short but prolific career are here, from "Radio Sweetheart," the flip of his first single, to "Ghost Train," from the New Amsterdam EP that came out this summer.
Like most throw-together albums, Taking Liberties is inconsistent and uneven. It's also revelatory in allowing us to hear Costello racing from style to style without pausing for breath. Although almost every song can be identified with one of his four albums, the sequencing here wreaks havoc on any notion of orderly progression.
Since these cuts are outtakes and experiments that didn't fit into the game plan of any one album, Costello's eclecticism is shown at greater extremes. Therefore "Talking In The Dark" is a more blatant Beatle steal than anything on Armed Forces, the album it was recorded for but not used on; "Stranger In The House" is a straight country lament that didn't make it to This Year's Model; "Getting Mighty Crowded" apes R & B more explicitly than any other Get Happy take; and so on.
What comes out of all this stylistic leaping about is more than mere versatility. Even the mediocre numbers, like "Sunday's Best" or "Just A Memory," betray a voracious sensibility straining against the formal limits of Costello's talent. Most performers incorporate a variety of influences into what they do. Dexys Midnight Runners, a great British soul band, concentrates all its energies on rewriting the Stax-Volt sound, and Bruce Springsteen borrows liberally from a somewhat wider set of styles from the late '50s and early '60s.
Costello outstrips them all for sheer audacity — he wants to remake all of popular music in his image. He's firmly in the tradition of the world-is-my-canvas kind of artist who accepts everything that comes in range of his senses as grist for the mill.
Costello's ambition is an impossibly grandiose one, made all the more difficult by his limited melodic gift and vocal range. He has several wild cards that tip the scales in his favor: a huge talent for imaginatively stealing and recombining musical ideas, a determination to push his voice as far as it will go, and an endless facility for lyrics. "My Funny Valentine" is a good example of his vocal savvy. Costello makes it moody tour-de-force by singing with total sincerity with a slight echo on his voice and backed only by a minimal bass.
A better instance is Costello's own "Stranger In The House." The melody is a country cliche, as is the arrangement, and the lyrics are about a crumbling marriage — elegant C & W stuff, and in Rachel Sweet's version a full-blown melodrama. Costello's version here is superficially the same but with a completely different emphasis. His edgy vocal makes it into a song about an identity in the process of coming apart ("There's a stranger in the house / nobody knows him / but everybody says / he looks like me") as that familiar Costello dread takes over.
That dread is the cornerstone of everything Costello has done, and when it comes together with tense, pulsing music, the result can be an "I Don't Want To Go To Chelsea," three minutes of finely coiled suspicion and anger. "Ghost Train," the most recent song here, is an experimental piece that evokes more than it tells. It suggests that Costello will go further into personal music, following a direction roughly analogous to the Ray Davies of Village Green. And if he follows the Kinks' pattern, that means his return to a kind of rock 'n' roll is around the corner. But only a fool would rush in to predict what Elvis Costello has up his sleeve.
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