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By MARK PEEL
Elvis Costeilo is a throwback.
Everything about him, from his
short, tussled, greasy hair and
rolled-at-t he-ankles dungarees to his
Dresident-of-the-hiqh-school-Dhvsics-club
white socks and immense eyeglasses,
suggests the early '60s. Armed Forces, his
third album, sounds like it could have been
tucked into a time capsule at the 1965
World's Fair as an example of the music
young Americans were listening to in those
days. .
Elvis' music owes more to the Beatles and
the post-British Invasion American pop
bands like ? Mark and the Mysterions than
to his namesake. The songs are brief and to
the point, all of them coming in at under
three and a half minutes and half of them
under three. And there are six of them on
each side, a practice that ended in the late
'60s when the obligatory guitar solo was
introduced to pad and stretch thin material,
reducing to five and sometimes four the
number of tunes per album side.
Elvis' vocals are the center of interest
his deliberate, pleading voice resurrects the
model British accent that American pop
bands were so fond of imitating. There is
scarcely any guitar to be heard, the bass and
organ providing the principle instrumental
articulation. And they seem to tease the
Mark Peel is music critic for the Daily Tar
Heel.
listener with little scraps of melody that
serve as entrances and exits for Elvis'
singing a reminder of the days when 16
necessity. The Attractions are a precise,
virtuoso combo who provide a setting for
Costello's vocals that is inventive and
uncannily appropriate. Their greatest
Contribution is in the rhythmic complexity
they give to essentially simple melodic
material a sense not merely of motion but
of directed movement. The drums often
seem to carry a song forward by
compressing the density of the beat, giving
one the feeling of being pushed into a corner
of a crowded room. The organ eases Elvis
out from the thick, churning sound and
drops him down into a hushed, expectant
state in which his nearly sottovoce climaxes
(as on "Green Shirt") create a vocal tension
that is very nearly tactile.
And not since Paul McCartney has a bass
played so dominant a role in the sound
mix it functions very nearly as a lead
instrument throughout this album. Only on
"(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace Love and
Understanding" does there occur a distinct
guitar voice, and it bears a strong
resemblance to George Harrison's "I Want'
To Hold Your Hand" technique.
Piano and synthesizer layers are added
and peeled away along with different
combinations of the basic organ, drums and
bass accompaniment, creating an abruptly
shifting contrapuntal texture upon which
Elvis' acrobatic vocal lines light and depart.
The effect of alternating density and i
sparseness enables Costeilo to display ths I
dramatic range of his somewhat quirky f
voice. j
If Elvis' music is straight from the '60s, ths
lyrical content speaks directly to the "mg" C
generation at the end of the 70s. His son3 r'
eschew the naive kiss-in-the-dark quality of
their '60s forebears. Even when he sings
about a kiss in the dark, as he does on "Big I
Boys," he does so with a twisted obliqueness
that is frightening and devastatinq.
Elvis Costello's songs are, in fact,
riddles. He takes the
commonplace and subtly
refashions its familiar outlines into vaguely
recognizable yet foreign objects. A favorite
device is his ingenious distortion of cliches,
so that he becomes locked, for instance, in a
"grip-like vice." Unfortunately, these riddles
sometimes become nearly indecipherable,
as . in "Chemistry Class," in which the
listener is able to dimly make out the
circumstances of the song a modern day
high school re-enactment of the beauty and
the beast fable (with the physics club
president as the beast, perhaps) acted out in
the lab but the word-associational quality
of the lyrics defy any other than a narrowly
personal interpretation. I happen to imagine
a neo-Frankenstein laboratory in which a
hunch-backed Phi Beta Kappa-type coerces
the captain of the cheerleading team to sign
n,
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'Arroxtl Forces
a lovepact, but I really have no idea what
Elvis intends by:
Sparks are flying from electrical pylons
Snakes and ladders running up and down
her nylons...
You've got a chemistry class, I want a
piece of your mind
You don't know what you started when
you mixed it up with mine
Are you ready for the final solution?
It is this puzzling quality that keeps Elvis
Costello's music from being merely
nostalgic reproduction of a pop style that
was picked up and dropped in the
experimental '60s. Elvis Costeilo (along with
the album's producer, Nick Lowe, the great
archeologist of power pop music) has
reworked a style so that it is able to make us
as uneasy now as rock did in the last decade
I'd say that's just what our comfortable
aeneration needs riaht now. O
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