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| LOOK NOW--Elvis Costello |
Look Now, the new Elvis Costello is, at first listening, a
highly finessed and fussed -over a collection of songs that seem amorphous,
meandering, structurally inert. Lyrically, long Costello's strong suit, in
addition to being a solid melodist, reveals a man who has had a few too many
harvests from the same unreplenished acreage. Understandably, his
vivid imagery has been tamed for decades. Still, we witness here an attempt, over
and over, to remain allusive, elliptical, sketching in just enough narrative to
provide that this might be a tune that actually has something to say, buried
under the happenstance blankness of the lyrics. Those who want to excavate for
deeper meanings can leave their shovels and pickaxes in the shed. At age 64 Costello has been through this emotional thicket before, and one worries that he has nothing new to say. Worse, it would seem at his age that he
now lacks the knack, or interest, to finesse his established themes.
This is a
missed opportunity of somewhat immense proportions. It's been one of the more
intriguing aspects of being a close observer of songwriters as they age and
seeing how they deal with the unavoidable fact of aging, less nimble of
body and mind, simultaneously confronting the advantages and shortcomings of
getting older. We had it in the late work of Lou Reed, a writer who regretted
nothing in later albums and who tried to extract something like wisdom and
balance from his life of self-created
crisis.Or from Leonard Cohen, who kept his oddly compelling blend of religious
undertones and Laurentian erotica while emphasizing the intellectual paradoxes
and oppositions of instinct which a longer view of experience make possible;
Cohen embraced it and went on to offer a late body of songs that took the
problematic events of life and ventured into musings that traced a higher,
profound kind of irony.
Costello does none of this, and appears obsessed
with the awful curse of Miles Davis, a musician who found his genius for
quick changes in styles and manner of presentation resulting, late in
life, in work that might be better described as collaborations between rhythm
sections, synth players, producers, and engineers, with cameos by
the top-billed trumpeter. Some time ago, this artist decided to become a master of all genres and seemingly wanted to be thought of as a Modern Master
than as a consistently good-to-great songwriter. This pains me to say this, but
this hero of mine has been a superficial, over-stylized drudge for some two
decades. There is nothing that was preventing EC from becoming a latter-day
Bacharach or Newman, of course. It wouldn't have been an unworthy goal.
