|
|
|
Elvis Costello - Live at the El Mocambo
| Pitchfork |
|
Every new Elvis Costello album arrives with a critical assessment of his late-career eclecticism, which covers Tin Pan Alley, Brill Building pop, Southern rock, Nashville Americana, and many other ticks off his bucket list. If you're cynical, you might say he's become the thing he once railed against: an establishment artist coasting on the good will of his back catalog. If you're generous, you might argue-- fairly circuitously-- that he's simply rebelling against yesterday's rebellion. Either way, it's worth remembering that he grew up listening to Sinatra and Ellington and covered "My Funny Valentine" as a B-side back in 1978. Four years after releasing his debut, My Aim Is True, he released an album of country music covers. Because it came first, that angry-young-man intensity is often taken as his default setting, but perhaps Costello's punk-era sound was just another stopover on his odyssey through 20th century popular music. That breadth of interest and influence is apparent in even his earliest material: in its emphatic melodicism, in its clever arrangements, in his osmotic absorption of contemporary styles, even if they were raw (ska, pub rock) rather than refined (jazz, Bacharach). He may have been young, he may have been righteously pissed, but he sounds worldly on those early albums, and especially on Live at the El Mocambo....full text |
|
|
| Rollingstone |
|
Mystery Dance (Live At The El Mocambo) Waiting For The End Of The World (Live At The El Mocambo) Welcome To The Working Week (Live At The El Mocambo) Less Than Zero (Dallas Version) (Live At The El Mocambo) The Beat (Live At The El Mocambo) Lip Service (Live At The El Mocambo) (I Don't Want To Go To) Chelsea (Live At The El Mocambo) Little Triggers (Live At The El Mocambo) Radio Radio (Live At The El Mocambo) Lipstick Vogue (Live At The El Mocambo) Watching The Detectives (Live At The El Mocambo) Miracle Man (Live At The El Mocambo) You Belong To Me (Live At The El Mocambo) Pump It Up (Live At The El Mocambo)...full text |
|
|
| Allmusic |
| Live at the El Mocambo was recorded on March 6, 1978, during a club show in Toronto, Canada, as Elvis Costello and the Attractions were storming North America in support of My Aim Is True; the set was broadcast live by a local FM radio outlet, and this album is a clean but compressed, slightly flat recording drawn from the station's feed. Released as a promotional album by the Canadian branch of Columbia Records, the album soon became a eagerly sought-after collector's item, and before long it became perhaps the most widespread Costello bootleg on the gray market before Rykodisc gave the album a belated commercial release as a bonus disc in 1993's 2 1/2 Years box set. (The Ryko version, however, does clip out some of the between-song patter, including Costello's announcement that he's come to Toronto on behalf of Great Britain to ask for Canada back!) Replete with adequate but hardly spectacular audio and occasional flubs from the band, Live at the El Mocambo is a warts-and-all portrait of this band in their earlier days, but the seething energy of the performances is unmistakable, the stripped-down interpretations of the My Aim Is True material rock harder than their studio incarnations, and the version of "Less Than Zero" features the "American" lyrics Costello penned to make the song more relevant to stateside listeners. And it does sound a good bit better than any of the bootlegs available of Costello onstage during his formative period; if you want to hear what Elvis Costello sounded like on stage when he was still pop music's angriest man, this is the best place to go....full text |
|
|
Go to "Elvis Costello " lyrics