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Taking Liberties is Elvis Costello's second twenty-song lp in less than year. That's an awful lot of product from an artist, and he already has another lp release scheduled for January. One thing though, this is not a new album; it's a collection of unreleased material. (On American vinyl, anyway.) Sort of like the Beatles' Rarities. If you're a dedicated follower like me, you've already paid the inflated import prices for about a third of this stuff (argghhh!). But if you haven't, now's the time to pick it up.
Some of the songs may be familiar to you from other artists' covers ("Girl's Talk," "Talking in the Dark," "Radio Sweetheart," and "Stranger in the House"). Only Dave Edmunds outdid Costello (on "Girl's"), but the writer reclaims each song for his own. "Crawling to the USA" and "(I Don't Want to Go to) Chelsea" were available on the Americathon soundtrack. Most of Taking Liberties was too hard to catch on the first time around.
So now is the time to get in on the action that only collectors like me were able . to be in on the first time. And any album that has Costello doing a straight cover of Van McCoy's "Getting Mighty Crowded" is worth picking up on that basis alone. Problem is, Costello has recorded some turkeys, and three of them are here. "My Funny Valentine" (yes, the Rodgers and Hart song) may have been a good idea for a single, but it really does not cut it here. The new version of "Black and White World" isn't so hot, and pass over "Hoover Factory" while you're at it.
That still does not mean most of this album isn't great. "Wednesday Week" still sounds as snotty and abrasive as when I first heard it last year. So does "Tiny Steps." Possibly the best cut here is "Ghost Train." Costello's echoey vocals and the jazzy xylophone in the background set a near perfect imagery that is amazing to listen to.
Perhaps the most amazing thing about Taking Liberties is the fact that even though it hopscotches over Costello's three-year career (some tracks recorded without the Attractions), it is a consistently good album. Like Get Happy, most of the cuts were less than three minutes long (six are shorter than two minutes), so you cross over the ones you may not prefer. There is really so much stylistic versatility that it should be hard to find cuts that you don't like. So, as I said at the end of my Get Happy review last year... if you can't find one song out of twenty that meets your tastes, you may need new tastes. So pick up Taking Liberties and see how far you can go.
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