Guardian(London) North review

[johnfoyle]

see
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/reviews/ ... 41,00.html
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4 Stars.

"Long-time Costello watchers who welcomed the return of the old
bile-spewing
Elvis with last year's When I Was Cruel will be spitting with rage at
North.

It's an album of crooned love songs in a similar orchestrated style to
Nat
King Cole. However, from 1981's country Almost Blue to 1999's Burt
Bacharach
collaboration, Painted From Memory, Elvis has constantly confounded his
own
followers' expectations.

These 11 songs loosely document the breakup of his marriage to ex-punk
Cait
O'Riordan and engagement to jazz sophisticate Diana Krall, from dark
despondency towards what initially sounds like cloying sentimentality.

The 48-year-old singer seems as alarmed as anybody, lacing the
particularly
gooey Let Me Tell You About Her with hilarious lines that debunk the
notion
of Costello as lover, not fighter. However, with every play the album
becomes, like love itself, impossible to fight off - an irony that must
amuse the lingering subversive in Costello no end."

[LessThanZero]

Why are we continuously reading people write about how they just don't get it? If they don't get it, why don't they try something new? How come ropeleash and noise and all of the other brillient folks here don't take these people's jobs?

[bobster]

Hey, don't knock it! This is one of the very few (first?) good review he's seems to have got from the English press. (Four stars, too. Is that out of four or five stars?)

I'm starting to sense that thing I see in UK/European movies so much (and also happens in parts of the U.S., though I actually think it's less of a factor here, which for all our obnoxiousness worldwide, is something to be proud of) where people who leave the fold and try something else are invariably knocked down for having "pretensions" rather than praised for having ambition. It's not a pretty side of human nature.

[Otis Westinghouse]

Yeah, 4 outta 5. And Reality got the same. So yay for the good ol' Guardian, they still have taste. I like the last para of this. See, Bobster, to answer your PFM query, that LP lacks that quality. There was a good quote in one of the recent North reviews posted here - there's something that loves one (me, anyway) cold about much of PFM. The songs are technically passable, but it lacks the heart of most of EC or BB's work. I love Bacharach, he's a genius, and I was more than prepared to love PFM to death, but you couldn't. I adore This House Is Empty Now and In The Darkest Place, and of course God Give Me Strength, much of the rest is passable, but you wouldn't yearn for it. I hope I yearn for North, I want it under my skin.