All This Useless Beauty [Import]

This may or may not ditract you. I myself admire the fact that each song here can stand alone without depending on the weight of the others. Although they may not be the strongest songs he has written in his entire career, he does have a nice share of ballads with Poor Fractured Atlas, Why Can't A Man Stand Alone, The Other End of the Telescope, and the title track. His mysterious side bubbles up a little bit with Little Atoms and Distorted Angel. Even the amped up Complicated Shadows and Shallow Grave fit into the picture nicely, as does the extremely dramatic It's Time.

While this is not Costello's best overall album, there are no clunkers contained within.

As usual, though, the center of all this remains Elvis' wordplay. "All This Useless Beauty" started with EC's desire to produce a double disc that would encompass several of the songs he had either recorded with or for other people, and, meeting with the usual record company indifference, evolved into something completely different. You do get some of those songs that became well known for others (Til Tuesday for "The Other End Of The Telescope," Roger McGuinn for "You Bowed Down") but also brought to life a matured and wizened lyrical perspective. To wit: "Poor Fractured Atlas" always sounded like Hemmingway with a bout of depression.

The bonus disc is almost as good as the original album. (It helps to keep in mind that "All This Useless Beauty" started life as a two disc concept.) While the version of "That Day Is Done" won't make me forget Paul McCartney's from "Flowers In The Dirt," it will probably hit home with followers of "Oh Brother Where Art Thou." However, the haunting demo of "The Comedians" eventually became the version Roy Orbison chose to record, and it is easy to see why. Johnny Cash chose "Hidden Shame" (and from "King Of America," "The Big Light"). There's an early version of Aimee Mann's "World's Great Optimist" three years before her version appeared.

Like Bacharach, the songs on both the main disc and the bonus demos prove that Elvis could sit down and write a song with a target singer in mind and cast it well. "All This Useless Beauty" may have been underrated on its original 1996 debut, but this recasting of it by the great folks at Rhino make at all the more worth discovering, be it for the first or second time.