Schenectady Gazette, June 3, 1994

Bibliography   72 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 UK & Ireland weeklies UK & Ireland magazines UK & Ireland newspapers US newspapers US rock magazines US music magazines US magazines US alternative weeklies European magazines European newspapers Canada  •  Mexico  •  Asia Australia  •  New Zealand South America  •  Africa Blogs  •  Fanzines  •  Books Online publications Schenectady Gazette   1989 April 7 1989 August 15 1994 June 3 1994 June 6 1994 September 28 1997 December 21 1998 November 1 2003 October 9 2008 August 2  2013 November 6 2016 October 27  Newspapers   The Australian Belgium Soir Berliner Zeitung Cleveland Scene Columbus Dispatch Connecticut Post Correio da Manhã Corriere della Sera Le Figaro Financial Times Gazeta Wyborcza Hamburger Abendblatt Irish Examiner Irish Independent Irish Press Irish Times Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger Liverpool Echo London Daily Mail London Evening Standard London Guardian London Independent London Observer London Telegraph London Times Los Angeles Herald-Examiner Louisville Courier-Journal Mail & Guardian Marin Independent Journal Mail Tribune Melbourne Age El Mundo Neue Zürcher Zeitung New Zealand Herald Otago Daily Times El Pais Philadelphia Inquirer Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Pittsburgh Tribune-Review La Presse Providence Journal Radikal Reading Eagle la Repubblica Satakunnan Kansa South China Morning Post Der Spiegel La Stampa Der Standard St. Petersburg Independent St. Petersburg Times Süddeutschen Zeitung Svenska Dagbladet Trondheim Adresseavisen Trouw De Volkskrant La Voz de Galicia Wanganui Herald Wiener Zeitung Die Zeit — JUKEBOX Singer Elvis Costello has little to prove but still plenty to say Michael Hochanadel That perfect Memorial Day weekend was just a warm-up. Summer actually starts this week when Saratoga Performing Arts Center and the Starlite Music Theatre both open for music. SPAC presents Elvis Costello and the Attractions with the Crash Test Dummies Sunday. And the Starlite brings back the Neville Brothers Tuesday. When Costello played the Palace Theatre in Albany solo in early 1990, he first joined opening act Nick Lowe on stage for one song. then suggested everybody go see NRBQ at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. After intermission. Costello performed a stirring solo retrospective of sorts just as the 47-song Girls Girls Girls summarized his dozen-album first decade that same year. (Rykodisc has just reissued the complete Columbia albums on CD.) Typically, Costello now looks forward and backward at once. For his new album. Brutal Youth, he reunited the Attractions — his first band, who backed him on his first US tour in 1977, including a Page Hall show, and a Palace performance several years later. As “Girls Girls Girls” makes clear, Costello’s talent filled a void. Elvis Costello arrived just as punk rock began to run out of raw anger, and started searching for songs and a broader musical perspective. Costello had both — often distilled from a record collection big enough to match his very big ambitions. He may have sounded original by pumping up punk rock with melody, and shifting its focus inward from the headlines to the contents of his own head; but he’s always been a shrewdly resourceful assimilator rather than an iconoclastic innovator. He told “Pulse” magazine that the early hit “This Year's Girl” is based on the Rolling Stones’ “Stupid Girl.” for one obvious example. And he said of one of his early albums. “one song is the Velvet Underground, one song is the Byrds. another is Motown.” Perhaps his most direct appropriation is “Temptation.” which virtually Xeroxes a Booker T and the MGs riff. On the new album “Brutal Youth,” “London’s Brilliant Parade” wanders from melody to melody with a boisterous youthful restlessness like the early Kinks or Faces. “13 Steps Lead Down” also echoes British pop of the late 1960s/early 1970s with its raucous rave-up of distorted guitars, clattering drums and a driving beat. “Rocking Horse Road” puts a reggae spin on Nell Young. Costello ironically drawling the lyrical gem. “Just look at me, I’m having the time of my life. Or something quite like it.” For all his skeptical misanthropy and dour demeanor. Costello actually seems to be enjoying himself in Brutal Youth — which may always have been the case actually. When he played Page Hall, for example, he seemed to lose his temper when a fan laughed as the whammy bar flew off Costello’s guitar. Costello hastily retrieved and replaced it, then confronted the fan with a blunt obscenity. But he delivered it with a good-natured giggle he couldn’t quite suppress. Here, on Brutal Youth. he plays, sings and leads the band with the relaxed air of someone without much to prove, yet plenty to say. The band’s supple support sounds completely natural. Costello told “Pulse” that their comfortably familiar musical contexts spurred him on to an almost maniacally productive period of songwriting. He said he wrote six songs in a single day: and apparently drew them from the same wellsprings of what a skeptic might well call “classic rock” ..— a category that ironically now embraces Costello himself. Costello said he crafted “20% Amnesia” to sound like “a cross between Prokofiev and the Rolling Stones”; and if that sounds like a stretch, so was bridging some bitterness to reassemble the Attractions. Last to rejoin, but simply because he was last to be asked, was bassist Bruce Thomas, whom Costello criticized in the song “How to Be Dumb.” Reuniting is a demonstration of how to be smart. Not only has punk rock spawned a startling nostalgia, but Costello and his Attractions project an urgent immediacy that (still) sounds fresh (again). The Daily Gazette, June 3, 1994 Michael Hochanadel profiles Elvis Costello ahead of his concert with The Attractions, Sunday, June 5, 1994, Saratoga Performing Arts Center, Saratoga Springs, NY. Images File:1994-06-03 Schenectady Gazette clipping.jpg Clipping.

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