Impossible Stains

In 1986, Elvis Costello promised a windfall of albums, claiming he would release four. He made it halfway. Blood and Chocolate, reuniting him with the Attractions, was released in September of that year - a recording pissing fire and murky production – that many Costello completists escorted to the top of his catalogue. Its vitriol is chilling; the etched scenarios of love tap into our lowest emotional troughs and insecurities. It is the perfect soundtrack for lovesick suffering. From start to finish, there is a catharsis of spiteful jealousy, naked betrayal and abandonment, completing in the final kiss-off, “Next Time Round”. And that’s just three songs.

This was my introduction to Elvis. I was sixteen, dating a girl a year older than me and way out of my league (she was a hair model – whatever that means). Kelly was dark and mysterious and always out of my control; I was pliant, impressionable and needy. After a couple months, she just disappeared. It anticipated Murakami by a couple years. Her mother would tell me over the phone how much trouble she’d gotten herself into, that she was staying at her aunt’s farm – surreal things that would set my imagination boiling. She turned up in the arms of Eddie Goldsmith, a nob sharing my junior year at high school (point-oh-two Goldsmith, a nickname derived from his G.P.A. It was a Catholic all-boys school – it didn’t matter what you achieved, it mattered what you tithed).

I played “I Hope You’re Happy Now” twenty-seven times in a row. Made me feel a little better. “I Want You” gave voice to all my adolescent, sexually repressed anxieties. “Blue Chair” served a dish of sarcastic comfort and “Next Time Round” gave me some sense of closure.

This is not the easiest album to fall in love with, and it doesn’t serve as a welcoming entry to the Costello oeuvre. There are some challenging, purely depressing songs. “Home is Anywhere You Hang Your Head” feels a little too obvious in its self-pity; “Battered Old Bird” is a trudging but poignant memory recall of Elvis’ childhood building that makes one feel they had to be there to really ‘get’ it. Though his singing is at his most animal on this album – bordering on self-parody at times – these are the songs where the vocal despair is most apparent. They weigh the album down a bit, but they don’t kill its momentum.

Taking the restraint from his delivery works in other places – when he sings, ‘I knew then what I know now, I never loved you anyhow’ – you hear the affected lie. Or the lines that open ‘Uncomplicated’ – ‘Blood and Chocolate / I hope you’re satisfied what you have done / you think it’s over now / but we’ve only just begun’ informs the listener they are following the singer into uneven, romantic madness. “I bet she isn’t all that’s advertised / I bet that isn’t all she fakes”, “I suppose she never said to you / you were just in the way”. Oddly, the Costellian wordplay is kept at minimum in favor of brute, barked poignancy. “When you’re over me, there’s no one above you”. That’s about it.

Despite the standout cuts and some memorable pop songs, the strength of the album lies in its evenness and unique recording. Costello wanted a sound that couldn’t be pigeonholed to a time period, and he was successful: the recording of all instruments in the same big room, the bleeding of instruments' sound into each other's mikes…there’s a lack of reverence for the final product that puts the lyrics and song naked and center stage. At times experimental, it is mostly raw, and it supports the passion of the subject matter.