Each of Elvis Costello\u2019s first three albums announces the singer\u2019s presence by a snatch of unaccompanied vocal. This, we understand, conveys his urgency: He\u2019s too\u2026<\/b>
\nEach of Elvis Costello\u2019s first three albums announces the singer\u2019s presence by a snatch of unaccompanied vocal. This, we understand, conveys his urgency: He\u2019s too keyed up to wait for a downbeat, never mind a lengthy vamp. On \u201cWelcome to the Working Week,\u201d from \u00ab\u00a0My Aim Is True,\u00a0\u00bb three pickup notes (\u201cNow that your\u201d) rise into the guitar chords and backing vocal-group that enter on \u201cpicture\u201d; the band comes in, tidily, a bar before the chorus. By \u00ab\u00a0This Year’s Model,\u00a0\u00bb less than a year later, he\u2019s recruited permanent backing, but there\u2019s no confusion about the main Attraction. \u201cI don\u2019t want to kiss you, I don\u2019t want to touch\u201d; two full bars and a hint of anticipatory bass-drum, introducing the Who-inspired tumble of \u201cNo Action.\u201d
\u201cAccidents Will Happen\u201d opens \u00ab\u00a0Armed Forces\u00a0\u00bb with exactly one second of unalloyed Elvis; two vowel sounds (\u201cOh, I\u201d), meaningless by themselves, the second broken soulfully over two pitches. There\u2019s less time to get acquainted, and less need; by January 1979, EC\u2019s voice and persona were known quantities to many listeners. But the familiarity of the opening tactic is a bait and switch; sonically, the track that follows bears little resemblance to his earlier releases. The band swells up around Costello\u2019s voice instead of kicking in behind it, plunging singer and listener into a which-way-is-up murk that suits the opening lyric: \u201cOh, I. . just don\u2019t know where to begin.\u201d After the opening phrase, the singing voice is new as well, a deep near-croon that frames the song as a \u201cpop ballad\u201d (though the tempo is not all that slow), sharpening into something closer to EC\u2019s customary attack on the chorus. Around it, Nick Lowe\u2019s production adapts Phil Spector\u2019s reverberant \u201cWall of Sound\u201d to a small combo, with guitar and organ blended and spread across the mix, later complicated by touches of dub (the rifle-crack snare at the bridge) and psychedelia (the wash of cymbals and bass in the fade, which lasts for nearly a third of the 3:00 running time). Nuances of arrangement and performance emerge only on repeated listening: The three-note ensemble figure five bars into each verse, the double-time feel and closely arranged rhythm-section patterns of the chorus. Even without picking the record apart\u2014our purpose here\u2014its distance from the eight-to-the-bar drive of \u201cRadio Radio,\u201d the band\u2019s previous single, is unmistakable.
Structurally, the underlying song has little in common with its stated model, Bacharach\/David\u2019s 1963 \u201cAnyone Who Had a Heart,\u201d which slips between 9\/4 and 4\/4. Still, \u201cAccidents\u201d is the most elaborate construction Costello had so far released (with \u201cNo Dancing\u201d from \u00ab\u00a0My Aim Is True\u00a0\u00bb coming in second). Each section is off-the-shelf pop-song yardage, artfully joined by chiming transitional sections and a (Bacharachian) extra measure before the bridge The dramatic major\/minor shift between verse and chorus is foreshadowed by subtler chromatic motion in the second half of each verse, and recapitulated by alternating bass notes in the fade. The bridge ends with a standard V\u2013I resolution, but its melodic descent makes a virtue of necessity, dovetailing into the third verse on \u201cscare me so, there\u2019s.\u201d (Or \u201cscare me, so there\u2019s.\u201d) The final chorus cycles through the chords under \u201cI know\u201d two extra times before resolving, as the previous choruses do not, to the tonic. \u201cBig Boys\u201d and \u201cParty Girl\u201d end similarly, but less inventively.
The first verse traps the singer in a web of earlier songs: The other Elvis\u2019 \u201cIt\u2019s Now Or Never,\u201d The Supremes\u2019 \u201cYou Just Keep Me Hanging On,\u201d and \u201cI Just Don\u2019t Know What to Do With Myself,\u201d another Bacharach\/David song, which EC had covered live in 1977. The chorus adds Randy Newman\u2019s \u201cI Don\u2019t Want to Hear It Anymore.\u201d Except for the repeated Supremes line, a micro-chorus within each verse, these are supplanted by odd associations (fish\/mercury) and oppositions (made up\/undone) in later verses. The fade comes full circle: the repeated \u201cI know\u201d inverts the vowel sounds of the opening \u201cOh, I,\u201d and places retrospective emphasis on \u201cknow\u201d in the first line, chorus, and bridge. The long, singable vowel sounds also set off the harsh consonants of the verses: \u201ccheck,\u201d \u201ccollection,\u201d the \u201caxe\u201d of \u201caccidents.\u201d
The craft is precise; the content is obscure. This is no accident: the singer knows what he\u2019s done, but we don\u2019t. After directly addressing the listener in the opening line, the \u201cI\u201d is otherwise undetected in the verses, which follow a lover to the brink of faithlessness. The chorus and bridge shift to \u201cwe\u201d; betrayal, as Richard Hell had it, takes two. But the central line \u201cHe used to be your victim, now you\u2019re not the only one\u201d resists interpretation. (Not his only one, or mine? Only lover, or victim?) Determining just who\u2019s zooming who is less relevant than the sense that these people treat one another as toys, or tools, or pronouns\u2014anything but people. Telling someone you\u2019ve wronged that \u201caccidents will happen\u201d is fairly chilly, as apologies go, though EC sings the phrase without the arch emphasis on \u201cwill\u201d with which the phrase might be spoken.
As with the production, we\u2019re being softened up for the ambiguities and instabilities that pervade \u00ab\u00a0Armed Forces.\u00a0\u00bb The album\u2019s other verbal signature, the vocabulary of politics and economics, is largely absent. Allusions to failures of masculinity (\u201cthe silly champion\u201d) and communication (\u201cthe words that we don\u2019t say\u201d) are of a piece with the previous two records, and will resonate as this one proceeds. So will the intimations of physical harm\u2014but, in isolation, these read as strong but not excessive metaphors for the emotional kind, pages torn from the lexicon of love. Or so it might have seemed to listeners who encountered the record as a single. In that form, it reached #29 in the UK, as the May 1979 follow-up to \u201cOliver\u2019s Army\u201d; in the US, it stalled at #101, the very definition of \u201cbubbling under.\u201d
Excerpted from \u00a0\u00bb Elvis Costello’s Armed Forces \u00a0\u00bb by Franklin Bruno (Continuum, 2005). Reprinted with permission from Bloomsbury Publishing.<\/p>\n

\n

Sentiment rank: 0.4<\/div>\n

<\/div>\n

TW posts: 1<\/div>\n

TW reposts: 4<\/div>\n

TW likes: 15<\/div>\n<\/div>\n