Boston Phoenix review of North

[johnfoyle]

While hunting around the `net I came across this
review of North which I don`t remember seeing before.
North haters will love it ; the rest of us can
wonder just how long Mr Drozdowski had run out of
filters for his coffee machine , the poor lamb.

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http://www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/mus ... 210427.asp

Bad muse affairs
Elvis Costello goes south on North
BY TED DROZDOWSKI


ART FAILURE: decent art is never as inexplicably
colorless or deadpan as North.

Fans of Elvis Costello are in for a tough year. The
durable singer/songwriter plans to follow his dull new
album North (Deutsche Grammophon) with a late 2004
release of orchestral pieces he wrote for an Italian
production of the ballet A Midsummer Night’s Dream and
recorded with Michael Tilson-Thomas and the London
Symphony Orchestra. This is bad news for both lovers
of Costello’s sharp pop music and of orchestras.

On North Costello can’t make a 14-piece band sound
more interesting than a pallbearer’s suit, subduing
the normally vivid colors of horns, reeds, woodwinds,
and vibraphone into a charcoal background for his
limpid crooning. The best that can be said for this
album — which is the first complete botch-up of
Costello’s 27-year career and comfortably bears the
adjectives "pretentious" and "contemptible" — is that
when Costello is singing at his most artful on its 11
numbing numbers, he manages a fair imitation of a good
jazz singer’s ability to mimic the phrasing of a
trumpet, albeit without much range or flexibility. The
album’s peak comes when Lew Soloff nearly saves the
maudlin love song "Let Me Tell You About Her" with a
lovely flugelhorn solo that sidesteps the dead-ass
delivery and clichés of Costello’s lyrics, which are
full of rolling eyes, gentlemen not speaking of
intimacies, and other stuff that 1930s parlor romances
are made of.

Costello has long been an experimenter — a masterful
pop craftsman who, after establishing himself as one
of the best voices of ’80s rock, sought inspiration by
first exploring country music and then analyzing the
architecture of the great American songbook as
designed by George and Ira Gershwin and Cole Porter.
The latter resulted in his collaboration with Burt
Bacharach, 1998’s Painted from Memory (Mercury). He’s
also examined classical music as a route for growth,
collaborating with the Brodsky Quartet on the 1993
song cycle The Juliet Letters (Warner Bros.) and with
opera singer Anne Sophie von Otter in a program of
standards and originals on For the Stars (DG, 2001).
With North, Costello seems to be searching for a
middle ground where his cocktail jazz muse might relax
with its classically trained sister. Instead, he’s
turned both into cold, lifeless harpies.

The tunes on North also compose a cycle that begins
with the heartbreak of a lost love and ends with the
kindling of a new romance. It seems inspired by
Costello’s break-up with his wife, ex-Pogue Cait
O’Riordan, and the relationship he’s taken up with the
jazz singer-pianist Diana Krall. Costello has said
that the opening number, "You Left Me in the Dark," is
not about a divorce but about bereavement. Either way,
it’s given a supper-club treatment that seems like
satire, with Costello’s voice and Steve Nieve’s piano
playing cutesy cat-and-mouse games and the verses
drowning in self-pity.

By omitting hooks and choruses, Costello telegraphs
the notion that this group of songs is art, not pop.
But decent art is never as inexplicably colorless or
deadpan as North, which he would know if he checked
his creative compass. Perhaps Costello has fallen in
love with the smell of his own farts and expects us to
relish them, too. Or at least forgotten what he’s
learned from listening to the arrangements of Duke
Ellington and Nelson Riddle and found a soft spot in
his heart for Andy Williams and Johnny Mathis that
he’s determined to share. Even the charts for the
songs on which Costello is accompanied only by Nieve’s
piano are drab, with little room for melodies save for
those in Costello’s vocal performances. It’s as if he
wants nothing to distract from his whining on the
disc’s first half, or his cautious optimism in the
second. As a listener, stuck in the thick of this
mess, one prays for sonic distractions — really, just
interesting passages — that never come.



Issue Date: October 10 - 16, 2003

[noiseradio]

That's pretty harsh.

[johnfoyle]

`..the songwriter (E.C.) should score the next Disney animated feature..`

Yet another stinker of a review of North pops up from
the `net -


http://www.seattleweekly.com/features/0 ... eviews.php

September 24 - 30, 2003

ELVIS COSTELLO
North
(Deutsche Grammophon)
Much of Elvis Costello's oeuvre is built upon the look
of love from across the threshold, like a stage actor
squinting through a scrim and taking in a series of
malleable forms as a reality substitute. His clenched
teeth could barely contain the acid-tongued bon mots
of Blood & Chocolate, Brutal Youth, and When I Was
Cruel. Now, as the songwriter stumbles toward love's
embrace (in the form of new wife Diana Krall—yep, that
one), his cheeks can barely contain his tongue's
ceaseless wagging, rubbing like a dull pencil stub
against an empty page. That's the effect up North, as
Costello ruminates, "A change has come over me/I'm
powerless to express/Everything I know but cannot
speak/And if I know my voice will break" ("Someone
Took the Words Away"). His sentiment could apply to a
hush in the presence of his beloved or a complete
lapse of judgement in the face of love— the latter, I
trust. While previous orchestral collaborations with
both the Brodsky Quartet and Burt Bacharach found a
versatile sense of pop song craft, North suggests that
the songwriter should score the next Disney animated
feature. The arrangements — provided by key sideman
Steve Nieve and the Brodskys, among others — ebb and
flow appropriately, circling the songwriter like
cartoon animals perching by the riverbank. You can see
the squirrels winking at moose as they dutifully
gather winter rations and head underground to
hibernate. Maybe Costello should follow them. KATE
SILVER

[Mr. Misery]

In the first review the writer complains about "limpid crooning." Limpid means clear and simple in style. I wasn't sure why clarity and simplicity were pejoratives for the author until I read the rest of his convoluted critique.

The second review seems to be of his marriage rather than the music. She does mention that the arrangements ebb and flow and perch (!), an intriguing insight thrown in at the last minute but not elaborated upon.

I cannot agree with these limp and lame critics. Every song on North is brilliantly composed and performed, and considered as a whole it is a work of art that gets richer with each successive listening.

[Mr. Average]

I purchased "North" while visiting my Mother in Ohio. En route to see my son play with the Ohio State Marching Band in Columbus, OH, I played the CD for the first time on the car stereo. Having had access to some of the material prior to this 'first listen', and having the benefit of being exposed to Elvis' song interpretation through television specials, selected recordings, etc., I knew what to expect.

Emphasize "Expect". The beauty of this recording, which is its simultaneous undoing for the casual fan and reviewer, lies in expectation. My mother immediately remarked "Oh!, this is not what I expected from Elvis Costello! I need something much more 'bouncy'. He sounds so SAD." Her expectation was that EC was emotionally or intellectually "up" (same general direction as North) but that the recording was down. It betrayed her expectation.

Ironically, those who follow Elvis have learned long ago that expecting Elvis to stay in one spot for more than a few weeks is surreal. He is always pushing new frontiers. While we all have our own opinions of which periods, styles, and moods are his best, we appreciate that he defies expectation. We expect the unexpected, which gives us pause to allow a recording to be experienced as well as heard, and allow it to have a chance to breathe before it is evaluated within the scope of the great, diverse EC catalog. How many EC "Best Of" lists have appeared on this and related boards. Plotting the song selections from BlueChairs latest challenge (top 50 of all time) will be a comical scattergram, with a few predictable songs clusters like "Alison", "Watching", and "Radio, Radio"...only one of which made my top 15 list. Hell, my favorite EC recording of all time has changed twice since I began participating within this forum a few years ago...and the newer releases never held the top position.

Thankfully, the conclusion: My mother was disappointed in "North" because of an expectation and a need for him to fit into a certain category. I thoroughly enjoy "North" because of an expectation and the need that he does and will not fit into a specific category. I submit that these reviewers experience North against an expectation that confounds their judgement and renders a bias that is immediately transparent...especially in the review that heads up this thread...directly to the north.