In a move that’s pretty much unheard of these days, Costello followed up King of America the same year with another stellar album, Blood & Chocolate.
Where King of America is acoustic and country-influenced, Blood & Chocolate is electric and pure rock-and-roll. It’s opening track, ‘Uncomplicated,’ bursts from the speakers with a wall of shredding guitars as Costello spits out the ominous threat “You think it’s over now but we’ve only just begun.”
Indeed.
If Punch the Clock and Goodbye Cruel World were steps back, the album that followed them, King of America is a huge leap forward. And that’s an understatement.
King of America was the first Costello album I ever heard, after receiving it as a gift from my sister and future brother-in-law. The gift of Elvis Costello… tough to beat that. Talk about a gift that keeps on giving! I love the thrill of discovering a new artist, especially when there’s a wealth of previous material to dig through. In recent years I’ve had that experience with Stew and Josh Rouse. But Elvis remains the king in that regard.
U2’s latest album has been hailed as a masterpiece in such publications as Entertainment Weekly and Rolling Stone. It’s also been dismissed as something close to tuneless garbage by Time, Pitchfork and many in the blogosphere.
What we seem to have here is the old love-it-or-hate-it situation…. all or nothing. Except that I, well, like it. It is definitely not tuneless garbage, but neither is it on par with the band’s best work (The Joshua Tree, Achtung Baby, or even their last two studio albums).
Monsters vs Aliens contains an interesting mix of contradictions. It’s shot and animated using up-to-the-minute technology but in the service of a decidedly old-fashioned story; it’s steeped in the 1950s B-movie tradition, but its premise is decidedly feminist. Even the use of 3-D technology is complex, simultaneously reaching back to the gimmicky 3-D films of the 50s while hoping to pull modern audiences away from their computer screens and back into theaters.
Those juxtapositions are the most challenging and interesting thing about the film, which is mostly a paint-by-numbers action yukfest. This level of harmless fun and limited ambition is par for the course for a non-Pixar animated film these days (Kung-Fu Panda was a recent exception).
In the liner notes of a reissued CD of Goodbye Cruel World, Elvis Costello starts off with this encouraging sentiment: “Congratulations! You just bought the worst album of my career.”
It’s tough to argue with him.
I called Punch the Clock a step back, and compared to Imperial Bedroom it is certainly that. But Punch the Clock is a masterpiece compared to Goodbye Cruel World. This album suffers from the cheesy production that crept into Punch the Clock but also falls short in terms of the songwriting.
