KING HORSE: Tenderness and Brute Force

Elvis Costello, GET HAPPY!!!, PUNCH THE CLOCK (Rhino doubles)

What to make of Elvis anymore? I picked up these last year as “advance CDRs,” trading off fidelity for early, cheap access. Hoped picking up the real things would help boost his stock (can better fidelity redeem albums that have lost their inner sheen?) Disappointing. Except for GET HAPPY, about which more later, not much here stands up as well as I want. In college this guy was my hero, and I probably would have been more inclined then to admire his “classical” crossover moves, which now totally turn me off. For me he PEAKED with KING OF AMERICA, and he should still mine that country vein, because whenever he hits it good it’s remarkable. I even like ALMOST BLUE, even though it should simply serve to turn you on to all the original artists.


GET HAPPY is one of those CDs I have an intriguguingly weird relationship with. I can go months without it, and then I’m suddenly smitten and HAVE to hear it again and again. Sometimes this turnaround is completely satisfying, I hear new grooves, new details, new snarls, and I’m quenched. Other times, while I admire the writing, textures, and arrangements, I can’t get Milo Miles’s comment out of my head (paraphrasing): “Almost great, he needed Booker T’s MGs on that session.” And while I’m inclined to argue that the Attractions striving to achieve Stax-like pockets is pleasure in itself, more often than not it makes me reach for the Stax box itself. And then I swoon. And then sometimes I reach for BLOOD AND CHOCOLATE and I think it hits that perfect balance between early garage-rock and pithy self-consciousness.


Now, of course, he’s gone completely off his rocker (with NORTH, on DG), and his pretensions are unbearable. He seems to want us to believe that his career arc is one of increasing “respectability,” when his entire MY AIM IS TRUE stance was one of an uncompromising amateur. Doesn’t it do his early work a disservice to have him now straining to be accepted by the very aesthetics he once trounced? His musical smarts used to be at the service of rawness, and now he seems committed to smooth surfaces and superficial “emoting.” His singing has grown especially mannered. He used to have lyrical panache, the will to baffle, and now it’s like he’s writing for textbooks, exams, the very sensibilities he started out snubbing. Where his early producer-cohort, Nick Lowe, has made the move to flophouse lounge-singer with a wink and a leer, Elvis is stuck back in college trying to impress his professors. It’s alltogether unseemly, especially since his concept of range used to include so many more stylistic ideas besides “lieder.” I’d much rather hear him produce someone else, or write liner notes to whatever classical music he’s onto than keep failing at it himself.