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Post by Fuggle on Nov 4, 2004 0:30:53 GMT -5
Live Diana Krall DVD Set for ReleasePublished: 2004-11-02Canada’s leading chanteuse Diana Krall is preparing to release a DVD of footage captured at the 25th Annual Montreal Jazz Festival. Slated as “a career defining performance”, Krall played in front of over 15,000 fans at the June 29th, 2004 concert. The DVD, which is simply titled ‘Diana Krall Live at the Montreal Jazz Festival’, will be available for purchase on November 23rd. The songs featured on ‘Diana Krall Live at the Montreal Jazz Festival’ are taken mainly from ‘The Girl in the Other Room’, Krall’s latest full-length offering. Released in April of this year, the album has already gone double platinum in Canada, and gold in the USA. Also included on the DVD are a few extras, including the jazz singer’s video for ‘Narrow Daylight’, a photo gallery, and biography. Becoming Krall’s sixth studio-album upon its release, ‘The Girl in the Other Room’ has been Krall’s biggest success to date. The album took a step away from traditional jazz standards, with Krall and husband Elvis Costello writing many of the songs featured on the album themselves. Track-listing of the ‘Diana Krall Live at the Montreal Jazz Festival’ DVD: ‘Sometimes I Just Freak Out’ ‘All or Nothing at All’ ‘Stop This World’ ‘The Girl in the Other Room’ ‘Abandoned Masquerade’ ‘I’m Coming Through’ ‘Temptation’ ‘East of the Sun (And West of the Moon)’ ‘Devil May Care’ ‘Black Crow’ ‘Narrow Daylight’ ‘Love Me Like a Man’ ‘Departure Boy’ ‘Narrow Daylight’ Writer: Jaclyn Arndt
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Post by Fuggle on Nov 8, 2004 10:34:48 GMT -5
Brett adds Costello songs to her classic repertoire
By MARK MILLER Thursday, November 4, 2004
Bonnie Brett
At the Montreal Bistro
in Toronto on Tuesday
Singer Bonnie Brett and the smooth, stylish trio of pianist Mark Eisenman have been a team of some standing on the Toronto jazz scene for a few years now. If you didn't know that going into their first set at the Montreal Bistro on Tuesday, you might have guessed as much within just a few songs.
There's an easy familiarity in play here that quickly breaks down the usual hierarchy inherent in such groupings. This isn't a singer with an accompanying trio, or a band with a vocalist, it's four musicians who have come to work very comfortably and equitably together.
Of course it's not hard to spot Brett. She's the winsome brunette who does the talking, as well as the singing, although the other three -- Eisenman, bassist Steve Wallace and drummer John Sumner -- like to kibitz off-mike in response to the inside jokes that someone's always cracking.
Indeed, they're so relaxed in each other's company, Brett and the boys, that they can leave a listener feeling a little out of the loop, a disconnection reinforced by Brett's tendency to sing to some undefined space not far in front of her rather than make and hold eye contact with the audience farther away.
Still, she can be a charmer. She has a sweet, smallish but knowing voice that has brought her favourable comparisons in the past with Billie Holiday; Lady Day's influence remains apparent in Brett's longest vowels, but not in her delivery or her emotional demeanour more generally. She's now her own woman in those respects, brighter and more playful -- though not to the point of irreverence -- with the Cole Porter and Irving Berlin songs and other standards of pop Americana that she likes to sing.
She can be slow and loose with a melody, and quicker with a lyric, reshaping a song without going so far as to reinvent it completely. Her interpretative approach, meanwhile, shies away from high drama in favour of something friendlier; if, however, a song has a point to be made -- the sense of loss in Lover Man, for example -- she'll make it.
A jazz singer in the 21st century cannot, of course, live and die by early and mid-20th century songs alone. Accordingly, Brett has taken Elvis Costello to heart. Her most recent CD was all Elvis and two of the last three items on Tuesday were his dark and unswingable Punishing Kiss (afterward: "Everybody feeling really perky now?") and his sprightly Watching the Detectives.
There was a certain sore-thumb quality to both songs in Brett's otherwise classic set list -- to Punishing Kiss, especially -- but she closed out the 75-minute performance with an old Fats Waller ditty, Keepin' Out of Mischief Now, that seemed more convincing as an ironic bit of editorial self-commentary than as a solemn promise of things to come.
Bonnie Brett sings at the Montreal Bistro through Saturday.
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Post by Fuggle on Nov 23, 2004 8:19:30 GMT -5
Vintage Costello serves up an evening worth bottling
Iain Shedden 22nov04
Elvis Costello and the Imposters. Bimbadgen Estate, Hunter Valley, NSW, November 20. Palais Theatre, Melbourne, Tuesday. Bookings: 136 100. State Theatre, Sydney, Wednesday and Thursday. Bookings: (02) 9266 4800. Yarra Valley, Victoria, Saturday. Bookings: 136 100. Hobart, Sunday. Bookings: (03) 6234 5998. Brisbane Concert Hall, November 30. Bookings: 136 246. Barossa Valley, SA, December 4. Bookings: (08) 8564 3022. King's Park, Perth, December 5. Bookings: 136 100.
IT'S unusual to find Elvis Costello playing in a vineyard: even funnier when titles such as Tonight the Bottle Let Me Down and I Can't Stand Up for Falling Down pepper the set. Given his savage wit and love of word play, perhaps he chose those titles on purpose. Whatever the motivation, Costello's choice of material from his vast catalogue was as inspired as his performance on this first date of his Australian tour.
The dark country tinge of his latest album, Delivery Man, was the main influence. Songs from it, such as the bleak, angular Country Darkness and the title song were accompanied by tracks from his 20-year-old salute to Nashville, the album Almost Blue.
Good Year for the Roses and the aforementioned Bottle lament were just two of the highlights of this truly great performance.
That this set with his Imposters was almost entirely different to the one they performed here two years ago came as a sharp reminder of just how many great songs Costello has recorded. Outside the country domain, we got early classics such as Accidents Will Happen, Alison, Radio Radio and Blame It on Cain.
Dressed in a dapper suit and red tie, Costello hurried through the set with little banter. Perhaps this was an effort to get through it before the rain returned. Yet the soggy weather didn't dampen enthusiasm in the 4000-strong crowd and the man looked genuinely pleased to be there.
After nearly 30 years, on and off, at Costello's side, drummer Pete Thomas and keyboard player Steve Naive fit Costello's songs like a well-worn glove, yet they still bring a vital spark to the music, as does relative newcomer Davey Faragher on bass.
Costello seems to enjoy this comfort zone, which allows him to batter his guitar or add a subtle finesse at will as the band rocks solidly behind him.
That intensity reached a crescendo during the encore, when the glorious sweep of his greatest pop song, Oliver's Army, was followed by one his best rockers, Pump It Up. The latter came complete with the customary outdoor audience participation moment. So pumped was the atmosphere that even tired, cynical music critics were seen to raise their hands in the air. It was one of those nights.
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Post by Fuggle on Dec 4, 2004 8:03:22 GMT -5
Elvis Costello Hits The WineryBy Paul Cashmere 24 November 2004Elvis Costello at the Palais (photo by Ros O'Gorman)Elvis Costello is back in Australia with dates scheduled in wineries around the country over the next two weeks. This weekend, Costello with the Imposters will perform at Rochford Wines in the Yarra Valley on Saturday and then Moorilla Estate in Tasmania on Sunday. On Saturday December 4, he'll be at Peter Lehmann Winery, Barossa Valley in South Australia and on December 5 play Kings Park and Botanic Gardens in Perth. Last night (Nov 23), Costello played Melbourne's famed Palais Theatre. The setlist was: Accidents Will Happen Tear Off Your Own Head (It's A Doll Revolution) Waiting For The End Of The World Radio Radio The Name Of This Thing Is Not Love Bedlam Country Darkness Blame It On Cain Either Side Of The Same Town Hidden Shame (I Don't Want To Go To) Chelsea Good Year For The Roses Heart Shaped Bruise Everyday I Write The Book I Can't Stand Up For Falling Down High Fidelity Uncomplicated Needle Time Encore 1 Nothing Clings Like Ivy 13 Steps Lead Down There's A Story In Your Voice Alison/Suspicious Minds The Delivery Man Monkey To Man Encore 2 No Action Oliver's Army (What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding The Monkey Pump It Up Button My Lip
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Post by Fuggle on Dec 4, 2004 8:39:31 GMT -5
Elvis Costello and the ImpostersReviewer Shaun Carney November 26, 2004 Elvis Costello fronted a high-energy, emotionally challenging show that drew material from his entire songbook. Photo: Michael Clayton-JonesPalais Theatre, November 23 On Tuesday night, Elvis Costello, keyboard player Steve Nieve and drummer Pete Thomas strode purposefully on to the same performing space that had hosted their first Melbourne show back in 1978 and did just what they did all those years ago: they kicked straight into a back-to-back set of high-energy rock songs. Only a few things had changed. There was a little nod to modernity with a taped intro, Dave & Ansel Collins' Double Barrel, heralding the group's arrival, and the band has a different bassist. Instead of the linear, busy playing of Bruce Thomas, there is now the supple, swinging style of Davey Farragher. But otherwise, it was a quintessential Elvis Costello show, even down to the employment of the much-loved Accidents Will Happen, which was a brand-new composition back in 1978, as the opening song. What became clear as this show progressed was how adept Costello and the incredibly tight and versatile musicians who accompany him have become at a sort of sleight-of-hand with the playlist. Costello is no '70s revivalist; it's the new material that matters most to him. Throughout this 130-minute, 30-song set, he played 11 of the 13 tracks from his latest album, the southern-gothic song cycle The Delivery Man, many of which took on more lyrical and musical power in the live setting. But because he also rolled out most of his old hits - Good Year For The Roses, Oliver's Army, (What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding, Pump It Up and Every Day I Write the Book (reworked into A Hard Day's Night-style, beat group outing) - as well as some surprises from the back catalogue, such as the new wave classic No Action, the show seemed at first blush like an even-handed survey of the voluminous Costello songbook. Was it the best Costello performance Melbourne has seen? I'd give that honour to his Hamer Hall gigs in 2002. But as a testament to the life-affirming, emotionally challenging effects of four people playing amplified instruments, it was hard to go past. One more thing: Melbourne's Stephen Cummings, aided by guitarist Shane O'Mara, played a brilliant support set. Tickets were priced under $100. Who needs the Eagles? Elvis Costello and the Imposters are performing tomorrow at A Day On the Green, Rochford Wines, Yarra Valley.
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Post by Fuggle on Dec 4, 2004 8:45:53 GMT -5
Elvis Costello and the Imposters, State TheatreBy Bernard Zuel November 26, 2004Brainy songs ... Elvis Costello. Photo: Domino PostiglioneNovember 24 In a recent interview Elton John conducted with Elvis Costello, the rejuvenated John (whose two-decade slump ended three years ago when he once again tapped into the spirit of his early, best, music) said this: "With certain older records you can't even describe what it is that makes them sound so unique, whether it's the studio or the group of musicians. Those elements just had a way of working in conjunction with one another." As with the finest records, there's an ineffable alchemy at the core of the best shows which comes to define them. You can point to a high standard of playing or songwriting or sound and say that's why it works. And you'd be half-right: the cerebral half. For example, quite aside from Elvis Costello's songwriting, the band he has now can play pretty damn well by any criteria. Drummer Pete Thomas and bass player Davey Farragher do everything necessary superbly with not a superfluous, grandstanding note more, while Steve Nieve is an often astonishing whirl of improvised organ runs, electric piano stomps, theremin squalls and delicate spirals. But what marks them out in concert now, three years into their partnership (when the American Farragher joined the long-established English trio) is feel. Over and around the brain of these songs is the blood, bone and sweat of a group so in tune with the music and each other that matters flow without thinking. And that's true whether it is rugged as in the thumping simplicity of Uncomplicated and the slashing pinpoints of Needle Time, very danceable as in 13 Steps Lead Down and I Can't Stand Up For Falling Down or more sensitive as in the delicacy of Heart Shaped Bruise (coming out of a lovely Good Year For The Roses and featuring "Daveylou" Farragher standing in for Emmylou Harris on backing vocals) and Nothing Clings Like Ivy. In the company of a new batch of songs steeped in, but not simply beholden to, the basics of rock'n'roll in post-war rhythm and blues and unfussed country, this approach makes Costello's less refined guitar playing - where angularity, tone and absence where necessary are key - not just appropriate but vital. It also positively encourages moves such as the rolling thunder of the uninterrupted opening four songs (which climaxed in a throbbing-vein-in-the-temple version of Radio Radio); the perfectly judged Johnny Cash walking rhythm of Hidden Shame (which Costello wrote for Cash) alongside the southern soul touches in Either Side Of The Same Town and Peter Green's Love That Burns; and the pairing of Dave Bartholomew's 1954 New Orleans stomper Monkey with its "answer song", Costello's own Monkey To Man. To get this energy and thought matched by feel meant that this 30-plus song, 2-hour show, including an hour-long encore which was in effect a more energised second set, never felt anything but pulsating. It was a great rock (and country, and rhythm and blues) band playing great rock (and country, and rhythm and blues) songs. Sounds simple doesn't it? Hardly.
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Post by Fuggle on Dec 4, 2004 8:47:31 GMT -5
Why this Elvis is no impostor
Iain Shedden, Music writer 26nov04
IT'S impossible to calculate just how many characters and ideas inhabit the Elvis Costello songbook - harder still to imagine how they would unravel and bond together in story form.
That's one of the many creative conundrums the 50-year-old songwriter has confronted this year. When he's not writing for the opera or the ballet, or recording a rock album, or penning songs with his jazz-singer wife Diana Krall, he finds time to write what he hopes will be his first published book, drawing from the subjects of his many songs.
"I have no interest in formal biography," the singer said in Sydney yesterday, while admitting to enjoying fellow troubadour Bob Dylan's recent memoirs. Of his own book, he said he didn't know how long it would take to write, "because I have lots of other things going on. But it's a good thing to put creative energy or frustrations into".
Costello, who began his latest Australian tour last weekend, rarely has a shortage of projects to keep him busy. This latest outing with his rock band the Imposters follows the recent release of his album The Delivery Man, which coincided with the CD of his music for the Italian dance company Aterballetto's production of Il Sogno.
The latter is a rare diversion even for Costello. Ballet is an artform he knew little about. "I did it because I enjoyed working with the other artists," he said. Now he's writing songs for the Royal Danish Opera, for a production based on the work of Hans Christian Andersen.
Costello's multi-faceted output suggests a man driven by work and still ambitious despite his years of success. However, he says: "I've never had any ambition, ever. I think maybe for about 10 minutes in 1978 I thought, 'Yeah, I can have the biggest band in the world' -- those crazy thoughts that bands have. That was more an objective than an ambition, but then I thought 'why?'."
Fans of the veteran songwriter can enjoy an extensive trawling of his back catalogue on this tour. He plays more than 30 songs in a show stretching beyond two hours, and he changes the set list each night.
"Whenever you put out a new album there's always something in your catalogue that has some sort of kinship with it," he said.
His recording and touring leaves little time to spend with Krall, his wife of one year. "She comes to visit me in a beaten-up dance hall in Glasgow and I get to see her at the Albert Hall," is how he describes it. This week she is performing in Vienna as part of her world tour. Perhaps they'd get to share more quality time if they went on the road together. "Neither of us really needs the other's help," Costello said. "But we like to write together. I'd like to do more of that."
Elvis Costello and the Imposters are touring until December 5.
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Post by Fuggle on Jan 23, 2006 10:43:26 GMT -5
Costello's great escapeJanuary 14, 2006Elvis Costello in Sydney in 2004. The New York resident says of his native England: "I don't like English people that much!" Photo: Steve BacconElvis Costello has kicked with all his might against ending up in the pop factory knacker's yard, even when fans and critics pushed him towards it, writes Michael Dwyer. WAYNE WAS A spiked-blond speed freak with angry piercings who dossed in the cool student house across the street. He sneered like Billy Idol when he heard the slick soul-pop of Everyday I Write the Book, claiming final proof Elvis Costello had lost it. Sold out. Dried up. That was in 1983. Last week the most mercurial songwriter of his generation issued his 25th album. It's a live recording with a Dutch jazz orchestra, titled My Flame Burns Blue, an act of intense creative combustion that perhaps gets as close to musical alchemy as modern materials allow. In his notes, Costello describes a crucible of inspiration that includes hard-bop jazz maverick Charles Mingus, 17th-century baroque composer Henry Purcell, the film noir scores of Bernard Herrmann, his late-'90s mentor Burt Bacharach and his latest electric-guitar band, the Imposters. As these and many other threads weave into a unique symphony of high passion and intrigue that defies glib categorisation, I can't help wondering what ol' Wayne is into these days. To say the least, no punk was ever meant to make it this far. The new-wave momentum that propelled young Declan MacManus out of Middlesex and up the pop charts 30 years ago came with built-in restraints, as symbolised by the iconic bondage pants Sid Vicious lived and died in. Look at Iggy Pop, the punk movement's revered figurehead, a 60-year-old intellectual whose best offer this summer is the stagnant ritual of the Big Day Out. With the rock band he outgrew in '74, the Stooges, he's back in Melbourne in a fortnight to replay three-chord golden oldies in the creative hell of an endlessly recycled pop scene. The same week, as he plays his new orchestral score Il Sogno with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Elvis Costello will cut a far more rebellious figure. He's the punk that got away, maybe the only one not trussed up in the invisible bondage pants of rock'n'roll: corporate greed in spastic step with a lobotomised youth culture. Costello's unparalleled Houdini act has been far from easy. A decade ago, he seriously considered giving up music when one of his finest albums of impeccably crafted pop songs sank somewhere between a disinterested record company and an oblivious public. Its title was prophetic: All This Useless Beauty. His liberation from the jaded pop singer-songwriter archetype began with Painted From Memory, an album of richly orchestrated torch songs inspired, co-written and co-produced by Bacharach. The kids, by and large, were not mad for it. On a couple of albums since, he has enthusiastically revisited his early "rowdy rhythm" palette (he dislikes the term "rock"), but he's more often sought to stretch his parameters. Thus we've heard an operatic song cycle; an orchestrated album of romantic ballads, North; and the aforementioned Il Sogno, his first long instrumental work. . We shouldn't be too surprised. The son of a Merseyside big-band singer and trumpet player, Costello has been kicking against the rock-pop pigeonhole since he shrugged off his accidental punk affiliations in 1978. When explosive singles such as Watching the Detectives, Pump It Up and (I Don't Want to Go to) Chelsea cast him as the fresh prince of rock vitriol, he already had an escape clause. "The thought of me drying up doesn't scare me so much as the thought of me just repeating myself in a series of diminishing echoes," he said at the time. Shortly afterwards he called a moratorium on interviews, the better to short-circuit the media cult that had presumed to write his life script. And so began a vicious relationship with the music-media establishment, a stubborn face-off between artist and industry. Costello's first perceived departure from type arrived only four years after his skinny-tied new-wave debut. Almost Blue was an album of heartfelt country music covers that frankly incensed me, doubtless Wayne, and even the man who CBS Records somehow convinced to produce it, Nashville great Billy Sherrill. Not that any of us were really listening. According to Costello biographer Graeme Thomson (Complicated Shadows, Canongate, 2004), Sherrill "viewed it as an Englishman's indulgence, a cultural holiday in music he didn't really understand". John McFee, an American pedal steel player Costello hired for the sessions, had a different take: "Actually, he really loves country music. He's totally sincere, I think he's a great singer and he wants to make a real country record." There were wider accusations of dilettantism and pretension around Costello's next radical turn, The Juliet Letters, a classically arranged album composed and performed with the Brodsky String Quartet in 1993. After seeing them play a series of Shostakovich quartets in 1989, he'd been moved to learn musical notation - an optional unit in pop since Lennon and McCartney did without it, but one that would transform his work. To many casual fans and (especially classical) critics, The Juliet Letters was pure conceit. Even some of the artist's closest allies lacked the imagination to give it the benefit of the doubt. Costello told Thomson that a senior executive at his then record company, Warner Brothers, had told him The Juliet Letters "would be all right if it just sounded more like Eleanor Rigby". The corporate mindset was based on old top 40 charts; art could take a hike, and Costello did so after three more frustrated albums with Warner. On the final, contractually obligated hits collection, he quoted his song So Like Candy on the back cover: "Here lie the records that she scratched." Then came the abyss, then came Bacharach, and eventually the exhilarated reaffirmation of My Flame Burns Blue. But one man's spectacular escape from the pop factory knacker's yard is only half the point of Elvis Costello's triumph. The other half is what it represents. There are myriad options to be explored by the curious and/or maturing pop musician. Why is so little of real invention being released? But a larger reason that he finds himself an eccentric aberration rather than a leading light in pop culture is his breathtaking disregard for its values: lowest common denominator appeal and consequent enormous commercial reward. That, of course, is what pop means, so it takes exceptional imagination and daring for a musician to maintain focus on the culture side of the equation. When pitching The Juliet Letters to Warners in 1992, Costello predicted it would sell 100,000, a big call in a classical music pond where 15,000 is good fishing, but a huge pay cut for an internationally renowned pop artist. Then something remarkable happened. The Juliet Letters sold 300,000. "That showed there were far more curious people in the world than even I thought existed," Costello told me recently. "If you go around thinking nobody wants to hear something new, you'd never let yourself do anything different. You'd make the same record over and over again and that would be boring for you and for everyone else." Lord knows, the evidence is out there. Today, Elvis Costello lives in New York City with his new wife, jazz artist Diana Krall, as far as he can reasonably get from the pop-obsessed culture that first lauded and then all but rejected him. The trouble with England these days, he reckons, is that "culture and pop culture are the same thing". "Some (British) artists cultivate a kind of cherished old-uncle relationship there, but I never got that cosy. You know what? I don't like English people that much! I've got friends there that I love to pieces but the culture I can't stand. It drives me crazy. Too many people in too small a room, breathing too little air." Somehow, that reminds me of the cool student house across the street that Wayne used to doss in. Elvis Costello plays the Sydney Festival, between January 20 and 25, variously with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, the Brodsky Quartet and pianist Steve Nieve www.sydneyfestival.org.au My Flame Burns Blue is out now.
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Post by Fuggle on Apr 13, 2006 17:26:18 GMT -5
Class, compare and contrast . . . . . . the following artists: Arctic Monkeys (the new), Elvis Costello (the not so new)By George Varga UNION-TRIBUNE POP MUSIC CRITIC March 2, 2006It was 29 years ago that Elvis Costello emerged on the English music scene with the force of an active volcano, the seething fury of his music matched by the vitriol of his bitter, revenge-fueled lyrics. The year was 1977 and Costello was just 23, which is four years older than most of the members of the new English music sensation Arctic Monkeys. For all the critical acclaim he received, Costello's 13-song debut album, the now-classic “My Aim Is True,” was only moderately successful. It rose to No. 14 in England and No. 36 in the States, (where it would not pass the million-sales mark until 1991). He still has never had a No. 1 album in either country. Conversely, Arctic Monkeys' 13-song debut is the fastest-selling debut album ever in the United Kingdom, with first-week sales in January of 360,000 copies. It entered the charts there at No. 1, selling more copies in its first day of release (118,501) than all 19 of the other albums in the Top 20, combined. Much of the credit for this goes to the band's grass-roots following, which surged after fans began posting Arctic Monkeys' songs on the Internet – and downloading them for free – with the group's blessing. Even before it was released, NME, the UK's hype-fueled weekly music tabloid, went so far as to declare “Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not” the fifth best album of – ahem! – all time. Such a move surely did no favors for the group, or for NME's long-suspect credibility. CD review rating Elvis Costello My Flame Burns Blue Does such record-breaking success mean Arctic Monkeys' debut is superior to “My Aim Is True,” or that the group can equal the quality and longevity of Costello's career? In a word, no, although very few veteran artists can match his skill, vision and stylistic diversity. A more intriguing question is: Will Artic Monkeys fall prey to the same sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll lifestyle that cost the young Costello his first marriage? Only time will tell, although there are a few similarities between the band and the young Costello – notably a lyrical emphasis on sexual insecurities and obvious nods to their respective artistic inspirations. Yet, while Costello's debut proudly displayed his influences (from reggae to the Band), he was already swiftly rising above them. Not so the members of Arctic Monkeys, who add little to their influences, which include such equally derivative buzz bands as Franz Ferdinand, the Strokes and the Libertines. Alex Turner's prematurely world-weary vocals owe an obvious debt to glam-era David Bowie, one of Arctic Monkeys' few role models to predate this century. CD review rating Arctic Monkeys Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not The guitar-driven group performs with infectious spunk and energy, especially on its UK chart-topping single, “I Bet You Look Good on the Dance Floor,” the funk-inflected “Dancing Shoes” and the thundering, pop-punk rave-up “The View From the Afternoon.” The band vividly essays teen angst in its songs, but clearly requires more time to forge a distinctive artistic identity by developing its songwriting skills and musicianship. (On June 2, the Arctic Monkeys is scheduled to make its local debut, at SOMA.) Costello, meanwhile, has risen to another career high with “My Flame Burns Blue.” The two-CD set devotes one disc to 14 genre-leaping songs he recorded live at the 2004 North Sea Jazz Festival with Holland's 52-piece Metropole Orkest. The second features excerpts from his 2005 album, “Il Sogno,” the orchestral ballet score he was commissioned to write in 2000. Impeccably accompanied by the Metropole Orkest (whose previous collaborators range from sax great Stan Getz to San Diego guitar wiz Mike Keneally), Costello expertly bridges the borders between jazz and contemporary classical music, edgy art songs and Tin Pan Alley. This approach allows him to boldly reinvent old favorites – “Clubland” becomes a svelte cha-cha, while “Almost Blue” achieves new poignancy as an orchestral tone poem. The arrangements by Costello and such jazz luminaries as Vince Mendoza and Bill Frisell are exquisite, and inspire some of the richest and most accomplished vocals of his career. Arctic Monkeys would do very well indeed to add him to their list of major influences.
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Post by Fuggle on Mar 21, 2007 16:19:48 GMT -5
Taking LibertiesWritten by GL Hauptfleisch Published March 20, 2007 Part of Vinyl TapThe wordplay and mercurial ways of Elvis Costello can often be, to paraphrase one of his own songs, “so contrary / Like a chainsaw running through a dictionary.” It’s a restlessness evident right away in the fidgety craftsman’s recording career as the first albums — comprising a masterpiece-after-masterpiece trajectory — tried on different styles while tossing down a template of every-which-way substance, passion, and vision that would serve his artistry for a prolific 30 years. As impressive as the prefiguratively and aptly entitled 1977 debut, My Aim Is True, is, things got even better within a year when Costello trades in backing bands for This Year’s Model, as Clover — Huey Lewis’ News before they were above the fold — makes way for the Attractions. The transition from rollicking and raucous pub-rock punk to one of sonic spittle of bristling bite perfectly suits the anti-sentiments of a songwriter who dregs up from some nihilistic depths that “sometimes I almost feel just like a human being.” A semblance of humanity and compassion, along with a richly-layered pop texture, is ratcheted up a notch or two in 1979’s Armed Forces, but the melodiousness and accessibility were not necessarily divorced from the oft at-odds cynicism of social and political themes - there’s a reason the album’s working title was "Emotional Fascism". Such telling and menacing moods for moderns, along with a fusion of psychology and politics — largely couched in soul shouts and Motown might — characterize Get Happy!! from 1980. “Twenty Songs - All Different!” said the ads promoting this exhilarating sketch book-styled album: Couldn’t wait for the gorgeously lilting “New Amsterdam” to cease? Just wait two minutes and you’ll get the surround-sound of a pounding two-minute Motor City stomper “High Fidelity,” double meaning for all, and doubly demeaning for “Lovers laughing in their amateur hour…” As “High Fidelity” also states, “Some things you never get used to…” For an artist to put out four consistently first-rate studio albums in three years is an amazing accomplishment. For a record company — specifically Columbia Records, Costello's U.S. label at the time — to come along and compile another album’s worth of obscurities, alternate versions, non-LP B-sides, and European LP tracks never released here — well, that seemed like, and amounted to, Taking Liberties. That the bulk of these terrific toss-offs surpassed the quality of most other artists’ best material was an added bonus. In any case, it was certainly a treasure trove for American completists at the time. Eventually many of the songs would be available as bonus tracks on CDs reissued and remastered by Rykodisc, rendering Taking Liberties out-of-print. Furthermore, most could be found on Ten Bloody Marys & Ten How's Your Fathers, Liberties' British counterpart, which remains in print in Europe. Taking Liberties’ 20 songs — again, “all different!” — constitute a grab-bag of approaches, some reminiscent of tracks from Costello’s first four studio releases, others charting a wayward course or foreshadowing his own restive and untried-and-true efforts at “taking liberties” with such genres as country and western and popular standards. One of the most evocative tracks is “Big Tears.” Sounding like a quality cast-off from This Year’s Model, this slice of venom-on-vinyl is not only a high-powered stand-out track featuring Sex Pistols’ guitarist Steve Jones and a gale-force keyboard accompaniment from Steve Nieve, it also contains one of Costello’s most impassioned vocals. Though what would you expect from a track that begins with a seething set-up, “Everyone is busy with the regular routine / The sniper just takes his aim”? The insidious aside, though, builds to an climactic ending: “Big tears mean nothing / When you're lying in your coffin / Tell me who's been taken in / Tell me, tell me, tell me…” Similarly sinister but more ghoulish is “Tiny Steps,” which describes “Wooden bones and pretty lashes / Iodine for your baby's gashes / Little tombs for your baby's ashes / If something goes wrong.” A couple other songs also provide an outlet for an early Elvis-eerie proclivity toward the macabre: Matching the B-movie horror imagery of “Dr. Luther’s Assistant” is “Sunday’s Best,” a carnivalesque creep-fest which warns, “Don't look now under the bed / An arm, a leg and a severed head…” Of course, on the brighter side, there’s plenty of Costello’s hook-happy infectiousness and wit, although some songs may still straddle a line between violence and whimsy. Costello may express a wish to be “Crawling to the U.S.A.,” but in declaring that “I Don’t Want To Go To Chelsea,” Elvis’ desire to “Shake you very gently by the throat” has Pete Thomas’ punctuating percussion yielding to punch-drunk concussion. More unequivocal is “Talking in the Dark,” with its almost perfect merge of sentiment and refrain: I miss talking in the dark Without you, I'm not conversational Without the sense of the occasional Without you, I miss talking in the dark When the barking and the biting is through We can talk like we're in love or talk like we're above it We can talk and talk until we talk ourselves out of it. Less successful, surprisingly is “Girl’s Talk,” the dour original no match for Dave Edmunds’ sprightly cover. But sticking to Costello-to-Costello comparisons, similarly disappointing is the slow-crawl “Clowntime is Over,” and the countrified and mannered “Black and White World,” both improved upon in their final Get Happy!! versions, where they got, well, happier. In addition, and in an early attempt at producing, Costello, in the think-I-can “Ghost Train” can’t, although the woozy song does retain a lovely and memorable couplet: “Look at the graceful way she dances / On foot speaks, the other answers…” Then again, being happy isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and trippin’ the light isn’t all that fantastic. Some of Taking Liberties’ best moments come as the frantic turns tranquil, a shift as encapsulated in the five-gears-in-reverse schism of “Wednesday Week.” Costello’s “Talkin' 'bout the splendour” of history and the Hoover Factory, but the melancholy of the harmony-capped and too-brief tune is affecting as Costello slows in traffic to freeze a little time: “Green for go, green for action / From Park Royal to North Acton / Past scrolls and inscriptions like those of the Egyptian age…” The notion of time, whether ravaged or in reverie, marks the poignancy of “Just a Memory.” The melody is simple but haunting, the words redolent with regret and recrimination: Layin' about, lyin' in bed Maybe it was something that I thought I'd said With the tempo of today and the temptation of tomorrow I don't know if I could give you anything but sorrow They stay alive this late on Radio Five But the pen that I write with won't tell the truth 'Cause the moments that I can't recall Are the moments that you treasure Better take another measure for measure. There’s only on false note here, however, as Costello bewails that “…the pen that I write with won't tell the truth.” Elvis Costello’s songwriting — with this song, this album, and despite all the tempos and temptations throughout his career — belies such a lament. Poetic license, perhaps? Maybe he was just taking a liberty or two.
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