Word: bacharach
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...hard to describe and perhaps even harder to appreciate. Although he has always possessed one of the great idiosyncratic voices of pop music, his range and abilities as an interpretive singer have grown exponentially on his somewhat alienating experiments of recent years. His work on the songs with Bacharach is ambitious and expressive, informed with emotional truth and an outstanding dynamic range; he soars into high notes with a rough, intense vibrato and settles into bitter moments with deliberate, raw pauses. Opting for broad, naked sentiment over sneaky sweetness, rough around the edges, the album is nothing like it might...
...uninitiated, this praise may come as a bit of a shock. Warbling through a cameo in kitschy Austin Powers, Burt Bacharach has gained a prominence of late, with ripened sex appeal and flawless lounge credentials. In all the fuss, though, what has been neglected is the mastery of his songwriting, full of curious melodies, startling chord changes and the catchiest hooks this side of Top 40s radio. With lyricist Hal David and vocalist Dionne Warwick, he produced some of the best pop songs of the '60s, at the moment when rock was sending the pure songwriting tradition to its final...
Against the wave, Bacharach wrote a series of urbane pop songs so glamorous and well-arranged it was easy to ignore their startling edges of regret and emotional maturity. Discovering his work last year for the first time, I found myself caught up in the sensitivity of his songs, which could pack an lifetime of hurt into a flip rhyme and an abrupt meter change. Only Bacharach, for instance, could interpose the cheerful mood of "Do You Know the Way to San Jose?" with its underlying theme of disillusionment and the unspoken death of big dreams; while the arrangement glistens...
...young punk, might seem an odd sort to collaborate with a composer of sugary and sophisticated pop songs. However, his abilities as a songwriter, even in his early and admirable punk work, tended towards surprising revelations and explorations of the dark sides of love and politics; he even cited Bacharach and David as influences on his post-punk swaggering forays into murky emotions. Like Bacharach, Costello composes music that can quiver like shifting sands, leaning gently into a tremor of eloquence and anguish...
Together, they perform beautifully--Costello offers Bacharach his first substantial lyricist and collaborator since Hal David, while Bacharach roots Costello in a sound rich with splendid hooks and lush instrumentation. Costello entirely rises to the challenge of matching the Bacharach melodies with poignant musings on heartbreak, love stories laced with the chill of specific, damning truth. On the outstanding "This House is Empty Now," a moving portrait of a man who cannot make sense of the unreliable memories that inscribe his vacant home, Bacharach and Costello write: "Do you recognize the face fixed in that fine silver frame?/Were...