Costello & Toussaint CD Review
Elvis Costello & Allen Toussaint
The River In Reverse
(Verve Forecast)
This anticipated ode to New Orleans stirs the soul of the city, though The Angry Young Man’s voice often gets in the way.
Costello is so proficient at a bowl full of genres, he’s lucky to have an asset to tie it all together as him. Unfortunately, his nasal whine is it. Yelling rampantly over music penned mostly by NOLA’s bedrock tunesmith Allen Toussaint, it’s often difficult to grasp the earthy spirits haunting the tracks. Behind the boards, Joe Henry directs Costello, Toussaint, The Imposters, and The Crescent City Horns into a faintly safe mixture of blues and gospel, one that could use a little more than Steve Nieve’s B3 organ to provide texture. Aside from the chain-gang prayer of the Toussaint-sung “Who’s Gonna Help Brother Get Further?” River In Reverse feels mainly like a standardized Costello project (he wrote only one of the songs by himself and lo, it’s the title track). It’s solid and not likely to disappoint Elvis fans, but maybe it should have been built to appeal to more than one peer group.
— Steve Forstneger
Dear Mr. Forstneger,
You clearly don’t like Elvis Costello in the first place (“nasal whine”, “yelling rampantly”?). Perhaps you should have let a more objective colleague handle the review of the River in Reverse. As a displaced New Orleanian, I find this album to be an incredible tonic for the misery of the past 10 months and a dream come true to hear Toussaint and Costello performing together along with the Imposters and the stellar horn section.
How does this feel like a ‘standardized’ Costello project if the majority of the songs are Toussaint chestnuts from the ’60s and ’70s? And how is ‘Who’s Gonna Help Brother Get Further’ a “chain-gang” prayer? Do you know anything about the music of the Crescent City.
Alas, you are entitled to your opinion, but I can’t help but feel you were prejudiced against this in more ways than one before even listening.
P.S. Please re-read your first sentence, and then ask your editor to be more proactive in his or her duties.
Steve… Elvis Costello’s voice = nasal whine?