Village Voice, September 17, 1980: Difference between revisions
(+{{Village Voice index}}) |
(fix scan error) |
||
Line 10: | Line 10: | ||
{{Bibliography text}} | {{Bibliography text}} | ||
Elvis Costello's ''[[Taking Liberties]]'' — a twenty-cut, 1977-80 collection of B-sides, U.K.-only lp tracks, and three cuts | Elvis Costello's ''[[Taking Liberties]]'' — a twenty-cut, 1977-80 collection of B-sides, U.K.-only lp tracks, and three cuts prev. unrel. — is interesting mainly for the light it sheds on the trouble Costello is in. Like any such piece of product, the album is a mixed bag of left-field surprises and obscurities best left obscure, but what's disturbing is that all of the best material is at least two years old. The skin-crawling tension that kicks off the otherwise bouncy, be-my-baby love song "[[Radio Sweetheart]]" is just terrifying; the replacement of carefully constructed tension by the inertia-in-motion of something like "[[Crawling To The U.S.A.|Crawling to the U.S.A.]]" is just sludge. Ideas fly all around the earlier numbers — the strange reference to "goose-step dancing" in "Radio Sweetheart," the mystery of "[[Stranger In The House|Stranger in the House]]," the controlled repulsion of "[[Night Rally]]." Nothing is very mysterious about "[[Wednesday Week]]," "[[Dr. Luther's Assistant]]," or "[[Clowntime Is Over]]," but nothing is very precise, either; you can pick up a sense of desperation and betrayal, but it's bland for its vagueness. The music is convoluted; with "Dr. Luther's Assistant" the rhythm rolls over and dies. "Night Rally" hardly matches "[[Radio, Radio]]" (the song it replaced on the U.K. version of ''[[This Year's Model]]''), but it has a spine, a progression so insistent it suggests "Like a Rolling Stone" with all of the hope bled out of it, and what could be more appropriate for a song about the rise of the National Front? The most compelling thing about the later "[[Ghost Train]]" is its title. | ||
When Costello first came to our attention in the summer of 1977 — with his notorious, brilliantly careerist comment that the only subjects he felt qualified to speak about were "revenge and guilt" — he seemed like an anomaly: a craftsman in a season of one-chord prophets, a mirror-star of barely legal age who'd already learned as much from [[Billie Holiday]] as from [[Buddy Holly]]. Still, he fit the season. Johnny Rotten sang rants and Costello sometimes sang ballads, but they were brothers under the hype. The difference was that if Rotten's flame-out was implicit in his own performance, no less implicit in Costello's was that he was a figure to be reckoned with over the long haul. He said it in his music: in his classicism and in his commitment to form. Almost invisibly, Costello worked out of a mastery of doomy rockabilly nuance that could be traced from [[Carl Perkins]]'s "Dixie Fried" to [[Bob Dylan]]'s "Absolutely Sweet Marie." His singing and his melodies were often as fluid as Frankie Lymon's. His sense of small-combo dynamics, which came from [[Al Green]], the early [[The Rolling Stones|Rolling Stones]], Augustus Pablo, and the garage, could not have been more sophisticated or less effete. But Costello didn't sound like his sources; his personality was too strong and the stories he had to tell too intricately demanding for that. It could take years to hear [[Neil Young]]'s "[[Cowgirl In The Sand|Cowgirl in the Sand]]" behind "[[Watching The Detectives|Watching the Detectives]]." | When Costello first came to our attention in the summer of 1977 — with his notorious, brilliantly careerist comment that the only subjects he felt qualified to speak about were "revenge and guilt" — he seemed like an anomaly: a craftsman in a season of one-chord prophets, a mirror-star of barely legal age who'd already learned as much from [[Billie Holiday]] as from [[Buddy Holly]]. Still, he fit the season. Johnny Rotten sang rants and Costello sometimes sang ballads, but they were brothers under the hype. The difference was that if Rotten's flame-out was implicit in his own performance, no less implicit in Costello's was that he was a figure to be reckoned with over the long haul. He said it in his music: in his classicism and in his commitment to form. Almost invisibly, Costello worked out of a mastery of doomy rockabilly nuance that could be traced from [[Carl Perkins]]'s "Dixie Fried" to [[Bob Dylan]]'s "Absolutely Sweet Marie." His singing and his melodies were often as fluid as Frankie Lymon's. His sense of small-combo dynamics, which came from [[Al Green]], the early [[The Rolling Stones|Rolling Stones]], Augustus Pablo, and the garage, could not have been more sophisticated or less effete. But Costello didn't sound like his sources; his personality was too strong and the stories he had to tell too intricately demanding for that. It could take years to hear [[Neil Young]]'s "[[Cowgirl In The Sand|Cowgirl in the Sand]]" behind "[[Watching The Detectives|Watching the Detectives]]." |
Revision as of 00:37, 17 March 2013
|