Word: bacharach
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...tries to avoid the charge of merely trying to cash in by including snippets of dialogue and a fair number of movie-relevant songs (They Might Be Giants' "Dr Evil"). Unlike the hero of the execrable movie, the album remains firmly fixed in the '60s. It sadly lacks the Bacharach tunes and kitschy cover versions of the first two soundtracks, but it has a solid sense of pop music in Swingin' London, including the Monkees' "I'm a Believer" and the Zombies' "Time of the Season." The Guess Who's original version of "American Woman" also surfaces, the anti-American...
...label for their often-silly post-kitsch nods to pissed-off ex-boyfriends and love-struck goofballs, but it hardly accommodates the stylish, lingering sway delivered here. The grandiose sweep of "Narcolepsy" leads into a series of cool, ruminative ballads echoing the mellow-sweet classical pop of Bacharach and Rundgren. Folds blends everything from the country-western atheistic lament "Mess" to the lovely, disaffected suite of "Hospital Song," "Army," "Your Redneck Past" and "Regrets." The subdued and heartfelt "Jane" transforms him into a breathy late-night lounge singer. Lit by utter honesty and padded with flugelhorns and violins, the album...
...this gives me hope for the future of the Grammys." Of course the industry's pundits may have some trouble decoding the genre-bending messages from Wednesday's award ceremony -- Shania Twain's close-cropped black-leather stylings confirmed that country music has wandered far from the range; Burt Bacharach picked up his third pop Grammy in as many decades; and Best Hip-Hop Album went to Jay-Z, who combined ghetto-reality lyrics with a chorus from the musical "Annie...
...Bacharach supports Costello with mostly excellent arrangements which may leave his fans with a sense of deja vu: the twin flugelhorns, the wispy strings, the fuzzy horns, the retro female background singers. Only when Bacharach stretches his orchestrations into more rock-oriented territory does the music suggest outtakes from the schmaltzy Michael MacDonald recordings from the mid-80s. Few of the songs, though, sound so maudlin, and the melodies themselves stay thoroughly grounded in reality; these pop songs may be old-fashioned, but they sound far from melodramatic or artificial. Heartbreak itself, after all, is awfully old-fashioned...
What makes Bacharach and Costello's achievement so remarkable is their articulation of the coexistence of radiant love and its passing. Betrayals and reconciliations, obsessions and evasions coincide in the same words and while a song may express the despair of heartache, the music exposes the allure of it as well. The grief is unbearable but its melody is so sweet, so fragile, Bacharach and Costello seem to wonder who can live without it. Like love itself, of course, no one can. As in these desolate and beautiful stories, Painted from Memory suggests, we too may linger on the comforting...