11.16.2020
ELVIS COSTELLO ON TURNING HIS 1979 TOUR DE FORCE, ‘ARMED FORCES,’ INTO 2020’S SPLASHIEST BOXED SET
Variety: Chris Wellman: November 15th 2020.
In a Variety bonus Q&A, Costello revisits how Bowie and ABBA influenced him four decades ago, why he’s cool with the super-deluxe “Forces” coming out via vinyl, streaming and downloads but not on CD… and drops a new performance of the classic “Party Girl.”
Very few music boxed sets aspire beyond being gussied up digital repositories to becoming actual physical pieces of pop art. But opening up the new vinyl set from Elvis Costello, “The Complete Armed Forces,” feels like getting several Christmas mornings all at once, with a suitable-for-fondling nine records, seven paperbacks and various other ephemera intended to bring back the color explosions of 1979 as well as invoke other visual styles from the pulp-fiction ‘50s to the present. At the center of the “super-deluxe” set, enveloped in elaborate, Barney Bubbles-designed origami packaging, is one of rock ‘n’ roll’s fairly undisputed masterpieces, “Armed Forces,” a semi-concept record that reinvented Costello’s style three albums into his career and made “emotional fascism” sound like great, brow-furrowed fun.
But how many artists would have the chutzpah, more than 40 years into a career, to release a new studio album almost simultaneously with an elaborate shrine to one of their original glories? Although he ascribes the timing more to the whims of different record labels than his own plotting that’s what Costello has done in allowing this “Armed Forces” set to come out within a week of his brand new studio album, “Hey Clockface,” all but daring critics and fans to make comparative declarations that he’s lost a step since ’79. That hasn’t happened: “Clockface” has drawn its own merited raves as a very unnostalgic, sonically original dive into peace, love and modern misunderstandings.