I didn't get it at all. It starts off with a pop as the two-beat Love for Tender has punch and melody. Then it deflates as Opportunity seems to just plod to a namby pamby chorus without ever taking off. The Imposter has vocals but no words I can make out. Secondary Modern has a twiddly riff and stays under the wire. And so on. There are so many songs that it's impossible to think of the album as being anything but a big mess. A few plays later I start to get it. And it makes sense.
EC had already been doing this kind of thing. My Aim is True had a number of songs in a rock vein that strayed too close to California smooth for my liking but This Year's Model blasted all of that away with a garage pop veneer over a tough contemporary rhythm section and then Armed Forces took all that to the peak with more elaborate arrangements and expanded textures and themes. Really if I imagined something from Aim as done like something from the next two I'd hear Elvis Costello, I just didn't like the plinky generic studio playing of Aim. Get Happy was a little like going back to zero and starting from a different landscape. This one was more of a '60s soul feel but filtered through what the band could do by themselves.
Nick Lowe's producer note on the rear cover explained that the technology had improved enough for the cramming of tracks at the end of sides was no longer a problem. When you have twenty songs on an old LP there really is a need to explain that. If you bought a generalist compilation from the time (I had one of '60s hits) the audio quality just started diving from the middle of the disc onward. But if Nick Lowe wasn't lying I heard the same thing here. I'd say it was clarity getting muddy but it wasn't a clear sound to begin with. The production was so mid-range that it was virtually impossible to hold on to anything. That's before you get to the songs themselves which were no longer written with the violent archness of the previous albums and were softened with a broadening of subject matter. The songwriter I admired most from this time whose songs could make you choke as though you'd got a chicken bone stuck in your throat was now just serving up gristle.
There were moments of greatness that the worst production couldn't conceal. New Amsterdam is creamy and beautiful with a little crunch in the thoughts. Clowntime is Over rejuvenates an old timey melodic style into something important and compelling. Motel Matches gives us a new kind of country lament that is set somewhere between midnight and four in the morning and the magnificent Riot Act fills the ear and makes the mind swoon.
I made a tape of the songs I liked and took that back to Brisbane, leaving the rest of the album behind as a kind of sepulchre. Bye bye, EC, thanks for the inspiration.
It wasn't until the very late '90s when I bought a fairly good turntable from a friend that I put it on again. Different record. I could hear through the stodgy production, illjudged vocal harmonies (which sounded like football chanters trying to be the Beach Boys) and all that soul style which I've never warmed to. I heard the songs. Opportunity had real breadth and sadness, Possession a grandeur. I still didn't like everything I heard but at least this time I was hearing it. A few duds out of a list of twenty? I'll take those odds.
Then when the remastered CD versions appeared I restocked everything up to this one (article on Trust will come later) which carried the conceit a step further by having thirty tracks (B-sides including his demo of Girls Talk and a lot of outtakes). With the production boosted to take advantage of the great headroom of digital it sounded alive. More recently the hi-res download took that a step further still and is my preferred presentation of the record. The boom is still there, as it was intended, but now there's real bass and crisp highs that convey pure pleasure.
But before that I had the vinyl and the newer turntable and listened that first night of getting all the old discs out of boxes and felt warm (not audio warm which is a bullshit concept, I mean emotionally warm). Motel Matches came on and took me to my most recent fling. It had been my turn to get dumped (in those days it was almost even whether it was me or the other calling it quits) and the poignancy played straight into my self-pity, pouring into it like vodka from the freezer. I got my guitar on the bed and worked the song out and sang a whispered version as the night was getting on. It wasn't until I finished playing that I realised I had taken the trouble to work out someone else's song and go for a drive in it the way I hadn't done in many many years, the way I'd only done when I thought of songs as puzzle boxes whose beautiful secrets could be found through a little listening, reason and work. And it wasn't hard to recall that out of all the songs I had be-fanned in my grumpy, needy teens the ones I most longed to decipher, open and luxuriate in were Elvis Costello's. And here was the last of the puzzle boxes that I attempted. It had taken decades for me to get beyond the unlovely coating but when I did I saw the riches there straight away.
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