Bend Bulletin, February 20, 1986: Difference between revisions
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Like many a too-clever Brit before him, Elvis Costello has more than once professed a healthy disdain for many things American, yet often seems to aspire to nothing more than being one. | |||
At times he'd have us believe he's merely a country-Western crooner or a soul-shouter trapped in an angry young Englishman's body. | |||
That irony is hardly lost on Costello himself, as evidenced by the sly title of his new album — his first collection of original material to draw so thoroughly on basic, indigenous American strains of country, folk and blues. | |||
There are strengths and drawbacks in his approach toward traditional material: He's too dry, too intellectual — maybe too English, if you will — to make you cry the way his Nashville idols might, but the subtle, dazzling wordplay he brings to the form is well worth the trade-off. | |||
That ''King of America'', co-produced by Costello with T-Bone Burnett, is a rootsy album shouldn't be taken to mean that he's slumming. Those who've thought that his recent albums were exceedingly dry, studied and dispassionate may not take much more of a liking to the songwriting here, a good deal of which is as obtuse and cryptic as anything he's done. | |||
But context counts for a lot, and the overly fussy pop arrangements of ''Goodbye Cruel World'' have been replaced with a spare sound involving plenty of stand-up bass and Hammond organ and brushes and rim shots, with a little unobtrusive dobro or accordion here and there. | |||
The vocal nakedness that often results seems a smart offshoot of Costello's memorable solo tour of a couple years back. Ballads like "Indoor Fireworks," which gets more mileage out of one incendiary metaphor than might be thought possible, and "Our Little Angel," addressed to a woman's next betrayer from her last one, sound alternately caressing and dangerous. | |||
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Revision as of 18:33, 19 February 2016
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