CD Review: Unjustly Overlooked Albums Blood and Chocolate - Elvis Costello and the Attractions

Another in a series . . .

Uncomplicated, indeed. I like the perverse behind-the-music story of sorts surrounding Blood and Chocolate, Elvis Costello’s 1986 snark and snarl ode to snark and snarl, almost as much as I like its ragged, jagged, skeletal starkness and its seemingly hasty-afterthought spontaneity. In an interview shortly after his previous folk and roots-rooted release, King of America, Costello announced that, in the vein of the careful, finely honed craftsmanship and more straightforward songwriting that infused King, he was through with being overwrought and obscure. Wayward wordplay and a sometimes forced wit — that “chainsaw running through a dictionary” — is all very well and good in its place and time, but it's no match for heart and humanity, the hearth and home set midst the new morning coming ‘cross that Nashville skyline. His aim is truer; why, sometimes he indeed almost feels just like a human being.

A still contrarian one, perhaps. As soon as it took to drop the session musicians and the esteemed Presley cohorts, Costello, the anti-King, and anti-King, hastily reassembled the Attractions and herded them back into the studio for the unexpectedly scrappy new release, taking on for this project the new moniker Napoleon Dynamite, long before the Jared Hess, director of the cinematic Napoleon Dynamite availed himself of it, admittedly in ignorance (Elvis had no problem, saying that if the descendents of Presley and Abbott and Costello had no beef with him, then neither did he have similar objections). Blood and Chocolate — all edge and angle, two parts biting-the-hand anger to one part throwback recriminatory fixation — chipped away a considerable chunk of any residual good will and elegance remaining from the previous work.

Good. Taking him at his word, Blood was "a pissed-off, 32-year-old divorcé's version of This Year's Model," but for whatever reason — agitation, impulse, Dylan-style dissembling and musical legerdemain — Costello zigged when it was expected he’d zag, much like Neil Young, in an artistically healthy move, instinctively whiplashed in the '70s from the enormous commercial success of the mellow Harvest to more against-the-grain, shadowy works such as Time Fades Away, On the Beach, and especially Tonight’s the Night. Of course, Costello, with King, was unhampered by the burdens of commercial success, but he had the right intuiton, and better yet, the impatience and ever-present itch to explore, musically and — naturally hand-in-hand — personally: “If I’m gonna go down, you’re gonna come with me,” he cordially invited in This Year’s Model.

Article Author: Gordon Hauptfleisch

Gordon Hauptfleisch is a Blogcritics Books Editor, freelance writer, and book reviewer for San Diego Union Tribune Books (R.I.P.). For many years he worked in and managed bookstores and record stores, when not engaged in serious lollygagging. …

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