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North
Elvis Costello
Picks and Pans
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Elvis-ologists will credit — or blame — his recent engagement to jazz singer Diana Krall (a Canadian, as in from the north) for this slow-burning album of stripped-down ballads, stretches of which contain only voice and piano. Costello has been down this road before (for instance, on the string-quartet album The Juliet Letters), but this new disc doesn't feel like an experiment. He clearly chose these raw, intimate orchestrations (melancholy strings and horns come and go) to match the naked emotion of the new lyrics, perhaps the most direct ever heard from this bad-boy emeritus: "I long to hear you whisper my name / 'Till you tell me, 'My Darling, you may be my man.'" Cycling from breakup (Costello split with wife Cait O'Riordan, formerly of the Pogues, in 2002) to goo-goo-eyed new love, the songs are fine individually, but the exceedingly spare sound grows monotonous after a while. Costello would have been better off if he had been as swayed by Krall musically—using her voice in a duet, or her fuller arrangements-as he is emotionally.
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People, October 6, 2003
Picks and Pans reviews North.
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