Yahoo Launch review of North

[johnfoyle]

http://launch.yahoo.com/read/album.asp?contentID=214694

09/23/2003

By Ken Micallef

It began with 1982's Imperial Bedroom. The album
featured a newly reflective and ever poignant Elvis,
not the sarcastic new waver known for such lines as,
"six little Hitlers will fight it out until one little
Hitler does the other one's will." The fireball
wordsmith was replaced with Elvis-as-Sinatra, swooning
for an imaginary lover, God's lonely man. Angry Elvis
never really returned, gone to collaborate with Paul
McCartney and Burt Bacharach, fashioning himself as a
worldly torch singer with the Brodsky Quartet. Well,
while Elvis is quite the crooner, an entire album of
achy-breaky heartache is too much for the casual
Costello listener to bear. Imperial Bedroom was only
an experiment; North is a full tilt ballad blowout.
Elvis pens beautiful songs like the Bacharach-esque
"When Did I Stop Dreaming?" and the moonlight missive,
"Can You Be True?" Accompanied simply by piano or
strings or a subtle trio, we imagine Elvis in the
spotlight on a concert stage, or wrapped around a
streetlamp on a 1940's Warner Bros. film set. He pines
and pouts and bares his soul, releasing his inner
demons through majestic lyrics. "I will be there if
the days bring torment, not trust," he sings. "My
darling," he continues, "you make everything seem
right." It's so touching these 11 songs of pain and
sacrifice. "As a consequence, I can see out of the
gloom," he sings near North's end. We are simply
tourists along for Elvis's emotional outpouring. We
are humbled. Robert Goulet, Pavarotti, and Celine Dion
line up for autographs. But Elvis has left the
building. And so have we.

[miss buenos aires]

Six little Hitlers? Did I miss something?