Nothing terribly new in these - interesting summaries all the same.
http://www.riverfronttimes.com/Issues/2 ... music.html
Originally Published By Riverfront Times Wednesday, April 27, 2005
©2005 New Times, Inc. All rights reserved.
MUSIC
Return of the King
Elvis Costello comes back to claim America's throne
By Christian Schaeffer
Hell yes, he's cool. He's Elvis Costello.
Modesty has never suited Elvis Costello. Looking past his sideways sneer and knock-kneed stance on the cover of 1977's My Aim is True, one sees the phrase "Elvis is King" repeated endlessly inside the background's black-and-white checkerboard pattern. Almost a decade later, with a catalogue of punk, rock, soul and country behind him, Costello sacked his backing band, unplugged his guitar and proclaimed himself King of America with an album that traced rock & roll's roots through its country of origin.
Released in 1986, King of America marked the first stage in Costello's renaissance, a chance to reflect on his musical past while considering America's own musical heritage. Rhino Records recently re-released the album with the usual collection of demos, live recordings and collaborations, allowing listeners another pass at one of Costello's best (and best-loved) records.
Costello's rebirth took several forms, not least of which was the (temporary) abandonment of his stage name (in the liner notes, he is credited both by his birth name, Declan MacManus, and as the Little Hands of Concrete; the album itself is credited to "The Costello Show"). The Attractions, his unbeatable backing band through eight years and as many albums, appear on only one of King's tracks; instead, Costello hired session musicians from all points of American music. Jazz bassist Ray Brown plays it sweet and low on "Poisoned Rose," former Elvis Presley guitarist James Burton tears up "The Big Light" and accordionist Jo-El Sonnier gives Cajun credence to "American Without Tears."
But beyond the rootsy tone of the songs, King of America's beauty lies in the singer's tone of culpability and contriteness, a sharp turn away from the venom and righteousness of earlier Costello songs. In the album's opener, "Brilliant Mistake," the speaker looks upon consumerism, Hollywood charlatans and, finally, himself as fine ideas gone sour. Elsewhere, regretful post-war brides and slimy game-show hosts are looked on not with scorn or contempt, but with the empathetic gaze of someone similarly dethroned.
There may be no perfect Elvis Costello song, but "Indoor Fireworks" makes as good an argument as any. It revisits failed romance (a favorite topic) but addresses the failure with tender resignation; the "broken effigy of me and you" suggests a heartbreak so total that guilt and blame are irrelevant. Contrast this tone to the all-seeing stalker of "Alison" or the jilted fury of "Riot Act" and the gentler, wiser Costello emerges. Of course, this version of Costello would be blown to hell with his next album, the visceral and cacophonous Blood & Chocolate.
The timing for the reissue of King of America couldn't be better, as Costello is continuing his tour in support of last year's The Delivery Man, a scattered soap opera set in the American South. Just as King of America toured a nation both real and imagined with an amalgam of American music, The Delivery Man revisits gritty roots-rock to tell a story that, while ostensibly set in the South, transcends its setting.
To best capture the Southern Gothic spirit, the album was recorded at Sweet Tea Studios in Oxford, Mississippi. Oxford is best known as the home of William Faulkner, a writer whose abiding love for the South didn't keep him from cataloguing its sins. And though more lucid and digestible than Faulkner, Costello seems to have borrowed a page or two from The Sound and the Fury: the disjointed, many-angled storyline; the tangled family dynamics; and the creation of an imaginary land so real that it bristles and breathes in a familiar way.
The story in The Delivery Man is a bit difficult to unpack, and purposefully so. It concerns a mother and daughter and the appearance of the titular delivery man, who, according to the title track, "looks like Elvis" (presumably Presley, that first and only Protestant saint). Rather than stringing together a narrative, these songs offer snapshots of romantic disappointment and emotional friction among the three principals. On the record, Costello is aided by the honeyed voice of Emmylou Harris and the Louisiana grit of Lucinda Williams, further enhancing the album's Southern pedigree.
But the South isn't one musical style or storytelling technique, and Costello knows this. Like all of his interpretations, Costello tailors the story to fit his own vision and style of American music. Costello wields a resonant, reverberating Gibson hollow-body guitar and gives his voice the right amount of guttural gravitas without veering into twangy cliché. For his "rock" records (not his forays into piano jazz, ballet scores and orchestral soft rock), Costello is backed by the Imposters, who are basically the Attractions minus bassist Bruce Thomas. Here, the Imposters stay true to their master's wishes while throwing in a few curveballs. The album opens with the rumbling "Button My Lip," wherein pianist/mad scientist Steve Nieve quotes a snippet of West Side Story's "America," for which the band paid Leonard Bernstein's estate. In concert, Costello has gotten his money's worth by inserting the melody of "I Feel Pretty" (from the same musical) in his snaking guitar solo for "Clubland."
When he's not quoting Broadway musicals, Costello finds inspiration for his own work in the back catalogues of others. For source material, Costello went to New Orleans R&B singer Dave Bartholomew's "The Monkey," where the primate looks on his cousins with disgust and disbelief: There's no way that humans came from us, the Monkey says. Costello updates the tune in "Monkey to Man," which maintains Bartholomew's message but wraps it in a groove worthy of the Sir Douglas Quintet.
The social commentary continues in "Bedlam," a travelogue through Hell that uproots Joseph and Mary's trek into Bethlehem and places it in the heart of the Israel-Palestine conflict. The song is classic Costello, from the spitfire delivery to the distillation and distortion of Christian history (including his best bit of near-sacrilege yet: "I got this harlot that I'm stuck with carrying another man's child"). The song draws a straight line from the madness in Bethlehem and the Middle East to the corrupted name Bedlam, a word synonymous with institutionalized insanity.
How this all ties into Costello's vision is anyone's guess. Like all good writers, he leaves us with more questions than answers, and the vision we take from the work is dependent on what we bring into it. It's Costello's America; we just live in it.
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http://www.pitch.com/Issues/2005-04-28/ ... inder.html
Originally Published By The Pitch Thursday, April 28, 2005
©2005 New Times, Inc. All rights reserved.
BEAT GRINDER
Pump It Up
This year's model has even more soul.
By Andrew Marcus
Elvis Costello has always doffed his hat to R&B.
As much as any white rocker who hasn't imitated his black heroes outright, Elvis Costello is a soul singer. The influence is unmistakable in the rolling cadences of his singing; in the arrangements of his earlier radio hits "Alison" and "Everyday I Write the Book"; and on his latest album, The Delivery Man, a work more potent and poignant than anything he's released since 1989's Spike. Actually, it can't be parsed -- soul music is laced through Costello's records more tightly than his more overt obsession, country music, has ever been. But it's complicated, as obsessions tend to be.
The main complication boils down to a moment on tour in 1979, in a bar in Columbus, Ohio. Reportedly in the midst of a drunken argument, hippie musician Bonnie Bramlett accused Costello of ripping off Ray Charles. Costello in turn baited Bramlett by describing Charles with a certain disparaging n-word. It's anyone's guess why the effusively apologetic Costello has had to outrun this incident for more than two decades (while cranky Eric Clapton has gotten a pass for his unremorseful support of British fascists). But Costello has paid for it. The stigma he received after the press excoriated him is likely the reason he never became more popular in America. Then there are the personal repercussions, murky though they are: Charles himself snubbing Costello at an Elton John tribute concert in 2003, Prince rejecting his request to cover "Pop Life."
But there's another kind of tension that makes Costello unique among soul singers, white, black or otherwise. Though his music has been variously steeped in Muscle Shoals twang, Motown stride and Sam Cooke cool, his is soul music that runs the usual equation backward, hitting your brain first, then your heart. That's nowhere more apparent than on his purported tribute to Stax/Volt, Get Happy!! (released in 1980, the year after his faux pas), which balances a compact sound with an arsenal of ringy puns and wordplay, including a metaphorical relation of stereo equipment to romantic chemistry and the most literary riff on masturbation since Philip Roth. Since then, the tension has softened up gradually, and, 25 years later, The Delivery Man paints a Southern landscape with fewer words -- and tones of gospel and blues so evocative that the album might as well be a loose tribute to Charles.
"I have to live with it, with every Afro-American musician I meet," Costello told Rolling Stone last December, referring to the 1979 remark. "What can I complain about? It happened. But if people don't hear the respect by now, they've got their ears the wrong way around."
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http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascit ... 503203.htm
Posted on Thu, Apr. 28, 2005
Elvis Costello's a practical delivery man
By ALLEN SCULLEY Special to The Star
When the winners were announced this past February at the Grammy Awards, Elvis Costello was nowhere to be seen.
To Costello, who was up against U2 in the song category and Green Day's “American Idiot” for the best album honor, there was no point in attending the Grammys. Costello knew, he said in an interview during last month's South By Southwest Music Conference in Austin, Texas, that he had no chance to beat the competition.
“From where I was standing, I was happier to be in a club with the Killers or the Gorillaz or whoever they are and (skip) the madness for noble reasons, while the monolith that is U2 crushed us under their jackboot,” Costello said.
That sort of practical outlook, laced with self-deprecating humor and a good deal of genuine humility, was frequently on display as Costello was quizzed at South By Southwest by Bill Flanagan, a veteran music journalist and senior vice president at MTV, for about 75 minutes.
During a wide-ranging interview, Costello looked back on a career that began with the 1977 album “My Aim Is True” at the outset of the punk/new wave movement and has since seen him build one of the strongest, most varied music catalogs around. His collaborations have paired him with artists as diverse as Paul McCartney, George Jones, the Brodsky Quartet and Burt Bacharach.
And while Costello still releases albums at a steady clip, he said his live shows remain a primary focus. One such spirited performance is captured on the newly released DVD “Club Date: Live in Memphis,” which, in addition to showcasing material from “The Delivery Man” and fan favorites from throughout his career, also includes guest appearances from Emmylou Harris on five songs.
The DVD also showcases the work of Costello's current backing band, the Imposters. That group features two members from his previous group, the Attractions (keyboardist Steve Nieve and drummer Pete Thomas), plus bassist Davey Faragher. The Attractions bassist was Bruce Thomas (no relation to the drummer).
Although the two groups share three members, Costello said he considers them entirely different bands.
“A key difference between the Imposters and the Attractions is the kind of player, the kind of musician that Davey Faragher is,” Costello said. “And listen, this is not going to be an exercise in talking down somebody I'm well on the record of not getting along with, Bruce Thomas, the Attractions' bass player. But he simply can't play a groove. He's a great inventive, melodic bass player in a kind of style, but you cannot find a solid groove on an Attractions record. The Attractions rhythm section was Pete Thomas and me on rhythm guitar. You listen to the Attractions records, there were like three guitar solos (total). Since we've come up with a conventional rhythm section, obviously that relationship changes. It gives Steve more freedom to do different things and me to do different things. Davey also is a great singer.”
Costello's current focus remains on touring in support of “The Delivery Man,” an album he began work on in 1999, only to shelve the project for five years.
“I had the idea of the story,” he said. “I had the initial songs, which were ballads, and I was getting ready to make the record when one of these corporate somersaults (his word for a shakeup) occurred, and it became obvious that making a record for what then was Mercury (Records) would have been idiotic.”
By the time Costello returned to “The Delivery Man,” he no longer wanted to make a CD full of ballads (hence the presence of such rowdy tunes as “Button My Lip,” “There's a Story in Your Voice” and “Monkey to Man”). Costello had also decided how to use his story line.
“Most of the narrative detail is in the ‘Delivery Man' song,” he said. “And the other songs that are attached to the characters are from their perspective. So you have to use your imagination, really … I didn't feel (like) making a beginning, middle and end story. Then it becomes an opera. It isn't an opera. It isn't a concept record either. It's a series of songs connected by the narrative, which is expressed in ‘The Delivery Man' song.”
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Who Shot Sam?
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Interesting comments about Bruce not being able to play a groove. That's one thing that I have definitely noticed with Faragher - there's much more of a rock-solid rhythm section and fewer melodic detours. That is both good and bad. I'm thinking about the wildly hopping bassline on a tune like "B Movie" (I love the bass sound on that album) and have to admit that I miss that stuff a little bit. Faragher is a fine bassist, to be sure, and EC's albums are satisfying now in a different way, but Bruce brought something different, and fairly eccentric, to the table. Of course, Faragher is terrific at backing vocals too, so that adds another dimension.
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