http://www.musiciansnews.com/music/59/47/north.shtml
Elvis Costello
North
Cabaret singing is one of the most venerable of pop
idioms, yet one fraught with some paradoxical
pitfalls: betraying emotional candor, yet not the
studied artifice of the singer. And while Elvis
Costello has a long and successful flirtation with the
style, he's seldom delivered it with the consistently
stripped-down directness he's mustered here. Costello
claims the alum's songs bubbled forth nearly
fully-formed over the winter of ‘02-‘03, and indeed
they often ebb and flow with an unpredictable fluidity
that seems to reflect the songwriter's subconscious
mind (to the point of occasionally conjuring fleeting,
almost spectral melodic references from his beloved
pop standards) at its most creatively naked. For an
artist who's long prided himself on the willful
literacy and challenging symbolism of his lyrics, the
transparency of his romantic musings here is often
startling. Likely inspired by an arc of emotional
change in his own life (Costello hints that the
bittersweet "You Left Me in the Dark" and hopefulness
"I'm in the Mood Again" don't bookend the album by
coincidence), a subtext of difficult romantic
communication also surfaces repeatedly on tracks like
the dramatic "Someone Took the Words Away" and lovely
"When it Sings," while the neo-classicism of "Still"
reunites Costello with the Brodsky Quartet in arguably
the album's most traditional, sophisticated moment.
Backed by Steve Nieve's spare, haunting piano (the
instrument the songwriter composed the songs at; it's
the most guitar-free album of his career), the drums
of Peter Erskine, and double-bass of Mike Formanek,
with only the most economic of orchestral flourishes,
the mood is decidedly autumnal, Costello's gently
quavering voice pushed into the spotlight as never
before, a musical tightrope walk whose sublime
execution seldom belies its conceptual audacity.