|
Whether haughtily dismissed as ill-advised dallying or petulantly blanched as an edgeless, soulless regression, Goodbye, Cruel World, Elvis Costello's 10th album, has been, I think, too harshly and quickly pushed aside.
Although the majestic vocal gymnastics of Imperial Bedroom and the punchy, rollicking horn charts of Punch the Clock are basically gone, the annual array of striking, funny, tender songs is still present. And for that, one must be thankful
Likewise, that these potentially transcendent, but mishandled songs could have completed, in some critic's overworked imagination, a grand pop dialectic — and didn't — is a poor excuse (and one used, I think, subconsciously) for slagging the effort of pop culture's most well-meaning, literate and historically ravenous songwriter.
Consider briefly two of the year's best, and most disparate songs, "Peace in Our Time" and 'The Only Flame In Town." The former, a beautiful ballad, epitomizes Costello's best work of late — simple instrumentation colored with complex ideas. The unfeigned compassion obvious in every verse ("A man sits alone in a bar and says, Oh God, what have we done?") contrasts with the almost blank irony of the chorus to build one of the most cogent appraisals of our country's malaise of conscience that I've ever heard.
Accompanied only by a firm, deliberate guitar strum and tastefully sympathetic organ, Costello's vocal is concise, encapsulating fear, cynicism and exasperation without a trace of polemical condescension. The line, "There's already one spaceman in the White House, what you want another one for?," is the year's funniest and most sobering.
"Only Flame," on the other hand, is a pop song beyond reproach — piercing, groovy sax, slick metaphor (amazingly fiery, in the tradition of last year's literary jab, "Everyday I Write the Book"), dreamy strings, walking piano line and Costello's roguish crooning. The tune, more than simply pleasant, proves how accessible and uncompromising a soul nod by a white artist can be if placed in respectful hands, rather than vaudeville-ized by British fashion models or patronizing schlemiels such as Billy Joel.
An overall focus here, as these two songs indicate, is not readily evident — no thematic thread apart from a continuing search for personal detail at home and at war — and one concludes there is none. The work sounds rushed; Costello reportedly tossed off the material in two weeks in a rented office; but rather than a lack of lyrical coherence, it is the arrangements that suffer.
Costello, for some reason, allowed the Attractions (primarily keyboardist Steve Nieve) to overpower the melodies. Instead of animating the tunes, as the TKO Horns did on Punch the Clock, the backing often consists of snippets of totally unrelated and inappropriate ideas that never seem to have been edited or discussed.
Some wonderful images survive: the domestic purgatory of "Home Truth" ("Is it the lies that I tell you or the lies that I might?), the cabaret-cocktail cool of "Inch by Inch" ("You made me love you when you thought you were smart").
And "Worthless Thing," a cleverly veiled comment on the public's worshipful exploitation of superficially splendid, but ultimately hollow, idols (television, the image of Presley) — and vice-versa — is given room to make an impact with welcome, restrained backing. Not an anti-MTV rant or bitch about Presley rip-offs (people in glass houses, or something like that), "Worthless Thing" instead addresses and condemns a state of mind that has seceded from reality.
Elsewhere, however, problems with the arrangements and songs are so annoying and embarrassing that they create the illusion, I think, that the album is a failure. What reinforces this perception is that Costello begins to sink into the "enforced jerkiness" that he vowed to avoid so carefully after Armed Forces.
"Room With No Number" and "Sour Milk-Cow Blues" are less than interesting ideas to start with, and saddled by a hothouse of scatterass keyboard dawdling and drumming, they sound more like a Spike Jones soundtrack or Rip Taylor stand-up routine. "Deportees Club," an attempt to juxtapose decadent sophistication with screaming rockabilly-flavored backing, comes off merely as privileged whining — akin to the expatriate Fitzgerald complaining about life in France — rather than the hard-driving rocker it is live.
Nieve and the Attractions seem to be the stumbling block. On Costello's solo tour this spring, his magnificently powerful performances seemed to be nothing short of a revelation for anyone who witnessed them. But in the studio, the need to satisfy and utilize the talents of his band bogs down Costello and causes him to include lesser material simply to showcase a particular instrument. Nieve (who personally arranged "...And in Every Home" and "Town Cryer" on Imperial Bedroom) is an awesome talent, but at this point he is unable to subjugate himself to lead accompaniment.
This could've been a great album — it is not. It's a collection of some great songs. Some of Costello's best. And despite the high expectations inevitable with a major talent, that's not so much to complain about.
|
