plorentz's Full Review: The River in Reverse by Elvis Costello/Allen Touss...
Ever since Elvis Costello's landmark 1986 album King of America, which found the present Elvis backed by the other Elvis's band, Costello has grown more and more bold in his pursuit of collaborations with his musical heroes. He wrote songs with Paul McCartney in '89; he played on Roy Orbison's Black and White Night; he learned how to read music for the Brodsky Quartet. He's ventured into opera and sleak, nocturnal lounge with Anne Sofie Van Otter and his wife Diana Krall, and finally set about re-exploring rough-and-tumble rock-and-roll with Steve Nieve and Pete Thomas, two guys from that legendary punk band The Attractions. But perhaps the most famous and best of these diversions was his album length collaboration with Burt Bacharach in 1998, Painted From Memory. That album was a meeting of two distinct songwriting styles and pop sensibilities that merged the best of both into one unique, vivid, and lovely whole of aching beauty.
In a sense, it's easy to look at The River In Reverse, Costello's new album with the quintessential Crescent City Soul singer-songwriter-producer Allen Toussaint, as a sequel to Painted from Memory (even the cover art is similar). But this record comes across more as tribute than partnership (not necessarily a bad thing); and, as evidenced by the DVD that accompanies a special edition of the disc, Elvis Costello's latest expedition to Living Legend Land would appear to work much better as a long-form documentary film than a mere album (also not necessarily a bad thing).
As with Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (the story of which actually did produce a pretty wonderful feature-length documentary called I Am Trying to Break Your Heart), the story behind The River In Reverse is full of drama, pathos, and finally redemption through the act of creation. Costello and Toussaint had been planning a collaboration for several years - something along the lines of those old-fashioned "songbook" records by the great pop and jazz singers of 50s and 60s (of which Costello confesses his love), with songs culled from Toussaint's vast, and under-recognized body of work.
And then a hurricane, which shall here remain nameless, destroyed Toussaint's home and city. Toussaint fled to New York where he came to personify the very vital, unbroken spirit of New Orleans itself - though, while many people had heard the songs he was playing, many were also learning the man's name for the first time. Recording for the The River in Reverse started in New York with producer Joe Henry and Costello's band the Imposters, but the album was completed (and in a sense, could only really be completed) in New Orleans with the addition of the Crescent City Horns. This wouldn't be a record so much as a homecoming, or less metaphorically than we might think, a first act of re-building - and suddenly what might only have been another in Costello's long line of musicological essays masquerading as pop records took on the soulful gravitas of a battleworn Southern Baptist hymnal.
To remove these performances from their devastated circumstances would be to rob them of a certain power. To be true, Elvis Costello does less to "interpret" these songs than to simply revive them (and their common, Everyman wisdom - see the opener "On Your Way Down" or the furious syncopations of "Tears, Tears, and More Tears"), and the arrangements, however respectfully executed - with the notable exception of a couple of recklessly joyful trombone solos by "Big Sam" Wilson - are also pretty standard issue.
What finally sets the new versions of the "songbook" tracks apart is the to-hell-with-the-devil determination inherent in these performances - especially the anthem "Who's Gonna Help a Brother Get Further", sung (mostly) by the songwriter himself, an especially poignant message song centered on the idea that a strong, close community of people can be a lot more effective than a distant bureaucracy - that, like a man scrounging though the water-damaged, wind-strewn wreckage of his home (and indeed, his life) in search of a treasured photo album or ruined heirloom, Allen Toussaint went back to one of the hardest hit parts of New Orleans and pulled these songs, tenderly, out of the rubble.
Far more effective on their own terms are the handful of new songs that Costello wrote with Toussaint for this collaboration that largely fill up the second half of the record - songs like the melancholy waltz-time self-deprecation of "The Sharpest Thorn", which ends and then begins and ends and begins again with a stubborn-ness that borders on comical. But the truest highlight here is the solo Costello composition from which the album takes its title. "The River in Reverse" boasts the kind of violent romance, the Faulknerian sound and fury the made his last rock album (2004's The Delivery Man) so moving. But here, surrounded by the debris of leveled houses, the embittered chorus - Wake me up! Wake me up, wake me up with a slap or a kiss! - veers out of the realm of The Delivery Man's historical fiction into something far more immediate and visceral - as if he's throwing darts at a picture of Michael Brown as he sings.
There is something a little queasy-making about Costello's fervor in his apparent co-opting of the anger, the frustration, the bitterness and the feisty optimism of New Orleans' citizenry, especially given Toussaint's equally apparent placidity in the face of a far more personal tragedy. On the other hand, those contrasts lend the album a certain yin-and-yang balance - it is at once academic and emotional, highly tasteful, but undeniably cathartic. Still, it's something I'd rather watch than listen to.
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BECAUSE YOU NEED TO KNOW:
"The River in Reverse" by Elvis Costello & Allen Toussaint
Verve Forecast Records
Released 6/6/06
Produced by Joe Henry
54 min.
SONGS: On Your Way Down - Nearer to You - Tears, Tears, and More Tears - The Sharpest Thorn - Who's Gonna Help a Brother Get Further? - The River in Reverse - Freedom for the Stallion - Broken Promise Land - Ascension Day - International Echo - All These Things - Wonder Woman - Six-Fingered Man
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