Artist: Elvis Costello & The Roots
Label: Blue Note Records
Release: 2013
Length: 55:54
Rating: 4.8/5
When I was younger, I couldn’t stand either version of Elvis – whether his last name was Presley or Costello. With the one, the fake sweetness bugged me by my standards (even though the records sold like hotcakes); with the other, I turned away from the whiny melancholy, the Tom Jones-style orchestral swell and the ballless, stale lukewarmness that my ears got stuck in while a friend, and a connoisseur at that, walked me through Costello’s catalog. So I never knew the discography of this supposedly diverse British musician well enough to own any of his twenty-five studio albums, let alone claim I was fully up to speed on all the behind-the-scenes stuff surrounding this truly elusive character. My attention to the album Wise Up Ghost And The Other Songs slipped in mainly because of the collaboration with a jazz-soul-hip-hop guarantee of quality, the outfit going by the name The Roots, whose debut Organix or the outstanding Phrenology slide into my ears more easily and more often. The cherry on top was the grumbling of Elvis Costello fans (I don’t personally know a single one …), who were anything but happy with Wise Up Ghost, so the intrigue was too strong for me not to dive into the essence of it myself.
The collaboration between Questlove’s The Roots and the stubbornly rebellious Grammy winner Costello actually began four years ago, when they performed on the Jimmy Fallon Show. Costello was smitten with the album Voodo, which the production and musical guru with a sensual feel for detail, Questlove, had polished up for D’Angelo, and Elvis longed to get some of that juice, talent and balls into his own music. A radical version of High Fidelity and a remix of I Don’t Want To Go To Chelsea sealed the pact on a positive note, so it was only a matter of when a proper album would see daylight. And it came – as a sharp, intelligent reckoning full of music, with the biting, perceptive pen of the British grouch tossed in on questions of war, peace, the new worldwide terror of democracy, disappointment over the broken promises of the first black president in the White House, and plenty more. In the past, Elvis Costello tried to turn many a collaboration with various musicians from a test of musical chemistry into something potent, but with this latest one we can say he finally struck something unforgivingly biting, ruthlessly good and downright sonically addictive. Credit goes to a more mature, coherent set of both lyrics and music this time, resonating with the present moment and places on the brink of revolution, of the system flipping, or of the whole world flipping in some unknown direction. Total collapse and the breakdown of society are here, and in the middle of the increasingly felt decay of positive values and optimism stands the little guy, hit all the harder by the trends of division and involuntary slides from bad to worse.
»Gather some stones and make them atone,« Costello’s soft voice sings in Meantimes, and that’s exactly where the ominous, menacing, dense and dark substance at the very foundation of this neo-soul Costello collaboration shows itself. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves and move on to the small details that give the album Wise Up Ghost And Other Songs its whiff of pure gold. The assignment of letting The Roots play around with Costello’s old creations was accomplished more than successfully – what’s more, this is far more than a remix album, even though you can hear echoes of the past in some of the songs, which may get on the nerves of the ossified, set-in-their-ways diehards who insist on the immutability and untouchability of relics and reminders of the past. Wake Me Up thus melts Bedlam and The River In Reverse into a heavily seasoned funk goulash, while Stick Out Tongue might remind the nitpickers of Costello’s primal and failed attempt at rapping in Pills And Soap, with a pinch of newer invention in the form of National Ransom. Of course, the once-forced flow of words is now loosened up with a bit of proper push from the experts of relaxed soul-funk-jazz-hip-hopping. Solidity and coherence run through the whole album, and you can really feel a different, fuller production touch from Steven Mandel and the gifted Questlove, who this time dissect and glue the pieces of Costello’s own vision into a completely new collage, one never seen before.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuCptcW9BN8
Costello gets a political edge and the role of a herald, able to grab you with his newfound candid sharpness and topicality. »And we’ll stand in the light of your new killing ground and we won’t make a sound,« is the steel axis along which the lyricism weaves a web of resistance against the wicked claws of worldly oligarchs, who trample the masses and demand a quiet, obedient vassal, a modern-day serf or slave ‘liberated’ by democracy and capitalism. The first stroll through the suburbs of a megalopolis of confusion, Walk Us Uptown, is thus an invitation into a labyrinth of darkness, and with The Roots’ easy groove the smog and gloom of the political smokescreen go down more smoothly, so you can grasp all the pieces of the puzzle. The dark, cold tinge of the orchestration in Sugar Won’t Work brings back a sense of rustic roughness, and chaos and shadows of ill omen creep into the back of your mind, despite the feeling that this is essentially a Costello-style outpouring of love poetry about the unheard-of coexistence of two incompatible souls. The punchy funk of Refuse To Be Saved holds nothing back; a good hit of drums, horns and dirty Hammonds kicks you in the right direction of total addiction for your previously unprovoked nerve endings. A gorgeous interplay of organic feel for rhythm, sound and orchestral refinement, plus Elvis’s shamelessly compatible vocals, drive the train toward the no-less-dirty gem Wake Me Up, a wake-up call that then summons you back to the battlefields of the fragile, crystal-clear Tripwire. Sensuality presses through every pore as Costello and the superb The Roots sing a lullaby of destruction and annihilation to all the sheep in the system of false lulling, in the warm embrace of the systematizers and architects of the new world order. The sound of Satellite, with a lament built from muted, stifled backing vocals and horns in the background, adds extra value to what you’ve already heard. The aforementioned return to a funk-hopper frequency of liveliness with Stick Out Your Tongue then hums in a more distorted way with Come The Meantimes, which has all the elements and attributes of a full, juicy song. Questlove dominates with his snare hits, while organs, strings, a triangle and a good wall of backing vocals sit in the background, along with Costello’s suffering voice, which by now has grown ever closer to the heart. (She Might Be A) Grenade is the very definition of eroticism and sex appeal in minimalist form, with just the right touch, the kind you could already hear in the seventies (and younger folks mostly in the music from that truly notorious and great era of fertile creation). Cinco Minutos Con Vos sails into the world of the ever-topical The Gorrilaz in an almost Bond-like fashion, and the duet between Costello’s perpetually cracked, chipped vocal tension and the deep, Spanish soul sex appeal of the resonant and more resolute Marisol ‘La Marisoul’ Hernandez works beautifully, with her taking over the song like an unyielding dominatrix. Five minutes with you, they both sing, and we get one of those moments of well-planned suspense, which then, with the lightness of Viceroy’s Row, like a street stroll through the avenues of familiar yet so alienated cities, leads to newly erected walls of bitching and revolt. Americans resent the insincerity of the first black president, in whom they placed all their hopes, while the rest of us increasingly and instinctively reject politics altogether, and the game goes on past us – the outsiders of systemic cheating. The title track Wise Up Ghost is a proving ground for a sonic jam of dirty bondage, revolt, resistance and nerves, but in a sweet way. Revolt burns from the underground, and every last one of us is on the altar of the oligarchs’ vanity. Resistance is necessary, but it has to be smart, or we’ll truly become a transparent, bodiless shadow of ourselves. Wall Street didn’t fall after the uprising of poorly organized protesters, and Slovenian autocrats didn’t fall under an even more poorly organized clique of enraged demonstrators, who were against the system, sure, but more than alternatives and solutions they cared about details like whether they’d become a party or a movement, and so enslavement went more than two steps further. In the name of necessity and inevitability. And in the background hums a great set of the repetitive hypnotics of the superb The Roots with Costello and Brent Fischer’s orchestra. The conclusion is final and meaningful. If I Could Believe closes the parable of bitterness on a full note with piano and Costello’s voice, and the ironic gospel wraps it all up: we simply must not fall for the lies from the small screens, and faith in the good and in changes for the better won’t come true without action and activation in this world of softened-up idealess-ness, Costello concludes. Ideal and dreamy!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0SMu_IHaEA
The darkness and the exceptionally resonant interlocking of all the elements build an incredible golden combination, a true alchemy of parts that surely have to continue their journey someday. Wise Up Ghost is a phenomenal display of heart, coherence, tight playing and fearlessness, which marks every one of the dozen really well-tuned songs. In his own way, Elvis is constantly both pissed off and polished, The Roots are poisonously deep, funk-soul-minded and revolutionary, and after the very first contact with the whole thing, there’s no doubt this record will spin in the player again. In the name of quality, integrity and intellect, which this time is aired out, with Escher-like closed staircases, if I may borrow an image, it all does flow back to the same point – Costello himself – but the well-heard note of masterful manipulation, of playing with an already overplayed past, is this time calibrated into a completely new message. Old fans may therefore feel cheated and sense that the master took unnecessary shortcuts to the goal, while those of us who are less burdened see something totally new in it, something fresh and, this is key, better in quality than the never-ending serenades of the past. That’s exactly why I hope the maestros Elvis Costello and The Roots keep up their collaboration down the road, but not in the name of capital, coercion or the expectations of the masses, rather out of completely independent, selfish reasons for added value, an even nobler sound and even deeper messages, which next time might offer, besides criticism, who knows, maybe even a solution for finding a way out of the labyrinth of today’s age!
Lineup
Elvis Costello – Ampeg mini bass, guitar, organ, piano, vocals, Wurlitzer
Pino Palladino – bass
Ray Angry – bells, clavinet, Farfisa organ, keyboards, organ, piano
Damon Bryson – sousaphone
The Roots:
Questlove – drums
Kirk Douglas – acoustic and electric guitar, vocals
Mark Kelley – bass
Frank “Knuckles” Walker – bells, percussion, tambourine, rattles
The Brent Fischer Orchestra:
- Robert Berg – viola
- Sally Berman – violin
- Alex Budman – bass clarinet
- Matt Cappy – flugelhorn, trumpet
- Mark Cargill – violin
- Bob Carr – bass, double bass
- Drew Dembowski – bass
- Chris Farr – flute, saxophone
- Mike Ferrill – violin
- Brent Fischer – conductor, orchestration
- Sam Fischer – violin
- Alex Gorlovsky – violin
- Steve Hughes – Euphonium
- Roland Kato – Viola
- Anna Kostyuchek – violin
- Miguel Martinez – cello
- Kazi Pitelka – Viola
- James Poyser – keyboards, piano
- Bill Reichenbach – tuba, bass trombone, euphonium
- Korey Riker – baritone and tenor saxophone, saxophone
- Kevan Torfeh – cello
- Cecilia Tsan – cello
- Ken Wild – bass
- Elizabeth Wilson – Violin
Guest musicians:
Marisol “La Marisoul” Hernandez – vocals
Diane Birch – backing vocals
Production
Elvis Costello, Ahmir ‘Questlove’ Thompson, Steven Mandel
Tracklist
1. Walk Us Uptown
2. Sugar Won’t Work
3. Refuse To Be Saved
4. Wake Me Up
5. Tripwire
6. Stick Out Your Tongue
7. Come The Meantimes
8. (She Might Be A) Grenade
9. Cinco Minutos Con Vos
10. Viceroy’s Row
11. Wise Up Ghost
12. If I Could Believe
