Slate, October 15, 2018: Difference between revisions
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Glances are exchanged like fencing parries in the opening track "Under Lime," as a rickety old showman and a young female production assistant negotiate a dubious tryst backstage at a talk show. And in "Stripping Paper," where a woman whose marital vows have proved "hollow" pulls away their home's wallpaper and sees the whole history of the relationship revealed there archaeologically, layer by layer. In "Unwanted Number" — a girl group–style tearjerker that Costello wrote for the 1996 film ''Grace of My Heart'', which is loosely based on Carole King's life as a Brill Building songwriter in the 1960s — a teen who's found herself seduced, abandoned, and pregnant sings about how she's regarded as disposable by her ex-lover, her peers, and her parents. "Burnt Sugar Is So Bitter," the song here that Costello wrote with King herself 20 years ago, has a divorced mother reviewing the stages of her ex-husband's vanishing act. In "Photographs Can Lie," a young woman stares at a photo of her parents seeming blissful together, when she knows her father was a cheater — ''"Why can't she see through him?"'' — and fears she'll someday find herself in a similar picture. And so on, including the only worthwhile bonus track on the "deluxe edition," a song Costello composed for the recent movie ''Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool'', which movingly has a self-conscious older woman telling an infatuated younger man, "You Shouldn't Look at Me That Way." (It really ought to be the closing track of the main album.) | Glances are exchanged like fencing parries in the opening track "Under Lime," as a rickety old showman and a young female production assistant negotiate a dubious tryst backstage at a talk show. And in "Stripping Paper," where a woman whose marital vows have proved "hollow" pulls away their home's wallpaper and sees the whole history of the relationship revealed there archaeologically, layer by layer. In "Unwanted Number" — a girl group–style tearjerker that Costello wrote for the 1996 film ''Grace of My Heart'', which is loosely based on Carole King's life as a Brill Building songwriter in the 1960s — a teen who's found herself seduced, abandoned, and pregnant sings about how she's regarded as disposable by her ex-lover, her peers, and her parents. "Burnt Sugar Is So Bitter," the song here that Costello wrote with King herself 20 years ago, has a divorced mother reviewing the stages of her ex-husband's vanishing act. In "Photographs Can Lie," a young woman stares at a photo of her parents seeming blissful together, when she knows her father was a cheater — ''"Why can't she see through him?"'' — and fears she'll someday find herself in a similar picture. And so on, including the only worthwhile bonus track on the "deluxe edition," a song Costello composed for the recent movie ''Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool'', which movingly has a self-conscious older woman telling an infatuated younger man, "You Shouldn't Look at Me That Way." (It really ought to be the closing track of the main album.) | ||
None of this adds up to a grand thesis about the male gaze or sexual politics, thankfully. Costello got out of the business of pointed topicality long ago. In his early stuff, I would argue that many of the songs tagged as misogynist were equally as much about misogyny, from a critical stance (e.g., "This Year's Girl," currently the theme for the HBO series ''The Deuce''), though don't get me wrong, that line was certainly blurry (e.g., "Alison"). But here the man born Declan MacManus simply aims for richly empathetic sketches of humans enduring the ordinary ongoing mess and lets his characters' pains and confusions speak for themselves. Though this kind of earthy realism is not the trait he's best known for, Costello has long excelled at it when he doesn't let his own cleverness obstruct him. These songs are spiritual sequels to songs like "Veronica," the compassionate 1989 hit about an elderly woman with dementia that he co-wrote with Paul McCartney, or "The Long Honeymoon," about a woman's dawning realization that her husband is sleeping with her best friend, on Imperial Bedroom itself. | None of this adds up to a grand thesis about the male gaze or sexual politics, thankfully. Costello got out of the business of pointed topicality long ago. In his early stuff, I would argue that many of the songs tagged as misogynist were equally as much about misogyny, from a critical stance (e.g., "This Year's Girl," currently the theme for the HBO series ''The Deuce''), though don't get me wrong, that line was certainly blurry (e.g., "Alison"). But here the man born Declan MacManus simply aims for richly empathetic sketches of humans enduring the ordinary ongoing mess and lets his characters' pains and confusions speak for themselves. Though this kind of earthy realism is not the trait he's best known for, Costello has long excelled at it when he doesn't let his own cleverness obstruct him. These songs are spiritual sequels to songs like "Veronica," the compassionate 1989 hit about an elderly woman with dementia that he co-wrote with Paul McCartney, or "The Long Honeymoon," about a woman's dawning realization that her husband is sleeping with her best friend, on ''Imperial Bedroom'' itself. | ||
Besides King, Costello's other high-profile collaborator here is Burt Bacharach, revisiting their partnership from the lovely 1998 album ''Painted From Memory'', which Costello has said was another touchstone for this album. The 90-year-old master of easy-listening but complexly constructed songwriting co-wrote three tunes here: "Don't Look Now," "Photographs Can Lie," and the closing number about a woman justifying to her ex-lover why she's become the mistress of a wealthy older man, "He's Given Me Things." (He plays piano on the first two.) The bright 1950s and 1960s mainstream-pop sound that Bacharach helped birth is one of this album's stylistic models — "Why Won't Heaven Help Me?" verges on Dionne Warwick territory — along with girl groups, Motown (a Costello constant), post-Motown soul (less so), and Broadway musicals. There's some rock too, naturally, but the former New Wave icon these days proclaims that rock is "a big square thing that fills stadiums with a really square beat and it has never interested me," and he hopes it really is dead. | Besides King, Costello's other high-profile collaborator here is Burt Bacharach, revisiting their partnership from the lovely 1998 album ''Painted From Memory'', which Costello has said was another touchstone for this album. The 90-year-old master of easy-listening but complexly constructed songwriting co-wrote three tunes here: "Don't Look Now," "Photographs Can Lie," and the closing number about a woman justifying to her ex-lover why she's become the mistress of a wealthy older man, "He's Given Me Things." (He plays piano on the first two.) The bright 1950s and 1960s mainstream-pop sound that Bacharach helped birth is one of this album's stylistic models — "Why Won't Heaven Help Me?" verges on Dionne Warwick territory — along with girl groups, Motown (a Costello constant), post-Motown soul (less so), and Broadway musicals. There's some rock too, naturally, but the former New Wave icon these days proclaims that rock is "a big square thing that fills stadiums with a really square beat and it has never interested me," and he hopes it really is dead. | ||
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I love a good Dylan-esque tangent, mind, if it's truly good. And there still is some density here, particularly in "Under Lime" (in which the title refers at once to showbiz limelights, the lime in a mixed drink, and the quicklime used to dissolve a body after a murder), as well as the Beatlesque and Elton John–esque "I Let the Sun Go Down" (about an aging Brit clinging to the vestiges of the empire and possibly voting pro-Brexit). But even these songs — though maybe not the ska-soul shuffle (recall that Costello produced the Specials) "Mr. & Mrs. Hush," which is about quelling jealousy, possibly, I think? — come to sound straightforward enough after a few listens, compared with a lot of Costello's 1990s and 2000s output. And except for the first three bonus tracks, like the hideous broken-French thing "Adieu Paris" (which Costello tried to pitch to the late Johnny Hallyday), nothing seems like a mere genre exercise. | I love a good Dylan-esque tangent, mind, if it's truly good. And there still is some density here, particularly in "Under Lime" (in which the title refers at once to showbiz limelights, the lime in a mixed drink, and the quicklime used to dissolve a body after a murder), as well as the Beatlesque and Elton John–esque "I Let the Sun Go Down" (about an aging Brit clinging to the vestiges of the empire and possibly voting pro-Brexit). But even these songs — though maybe not the ska-soul shuffle (recall that Costello produced the Specials) "Mr. & Mrs. Hush," which is about quelling jealousy, possibly, I think? — come to sound straightforward enough after a few listens, compared with a lot of Costello's 1990s and 2000s output. And except for the first three bonus tracks, like the hideous broken-French thing "Adieu Paris" (which Costello tried to pitch to the late Johnny Hallyday), nothing seems like a mere genre exercise. | ||
Selecting from a decade and more's buildup of songs seems to have been a winning method of quality control. "Stripping Paper," "Unwanted Number," "Photographs Don't Lie," the orchestral Philadelphia soul–style "Suspect My Tears" — about a couple vying to win arguments by out-weeping each other ("two hypocrites collide") — and perhaps a couple of others earn places on Costello's spinning wheel of classics. And the throughline of vignettes on gender and relationships helps ''Look Now'' feel like a defined space one can enter, survey, and contemplate over sustained time — not to analyze current urgencies, but to relate to and reflect on however we might, while enjoying enormously well-realized music. It's not as if Costello would have any revelations rendering him required listening for young fans of, say, Solange or Julien Baker. But for longtime, oft-frustrated lovers of Costello's work, the arrival of a thoroughly satisfying album, a set of sharply beautiful songs also pertinent to everyday concerns — rather than padding Costello's quiver of acquired styles or the self-mythology of our Beloved Entertainer — is more than enough cause to get happy. | Selecting from a decade and more's buildup of songs seems to have been a winning method of quality control. "Stripping Paper," "Unwanted Number," "Photographs Don't Lie," the orchestral Philadelphia soul–style "Suspect My Tears" — about a couple vying to win arguments by out-weeping each other (''"two hypocrites collide"'') — and perhaps a couple of others earn places on Costello's spinning wheel of classics. And the throughline of vignettes on gender and relationships helps ''Look Now'' feel like a defined space one can enter, survey, and contemplate over sustained time — not to analyze current urgencies, but to relate to and reflect on however we might, while enjoying enormously well-realized music. It's not as if Costello would have any revelations rendering him required listening for young fans of, say, Solange or Julien Baker. But for longtime, oft-frustrated lovers of Costello's work, the arrival of a thoroughly satisfying album, a set of sharply beautiful songs also pertinent to everyday concerns — rather than padding Costello's quiver of acquired styles or the self-mythology of our Beloved Entertainer — is more than enough cause to get happy. | ||
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Revision as of 07:25, 18 October 2018
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