Word: popped
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...necessarily known for wit or verbal agility, Mizrahi emerged in TV interviews, and especially in the acclaimed 1995 documentary about him, Unzipped, as a kind of Seventh Avenue Oscar Wilde, quipping endlessly about fashion ("It's almost impossible to have any style at all without the right dog"), pop culture and, always eagerly, himself. In the past few years, Mizrahi had cultivated the kind of celebrity that made him known to people who have never heard of shantung or bias cuts...
Costello's rich vocal work on the album is hard to describe and perhaps even harder to appreciate. Although he has always possessed one of the great idiosyncratic voices of pop music, his range and abilities as an interpretive singer have grown exponentially on his somewhat alienating experiments of recent years. His work on the songs with Bacharach is ambitious and expressive, informed with emotional truth and an outstanding dynamic range; he soars into high notes with a rough, intense vibrato and settles into bitter moments with deliberate, raw pauses. Opting for broad, naked sentiment over sneaky sweetness, rough around...
Against the wave, Bacharach wrote a series of urbane pop songs so glamorous and well-arranged it was easy to ignore their startling edges of regret and emotional maturity. Discovering his work last year for the first time, I found myself caught up in the sensitivity of his songs, which could pack an lifetime of hurt into a flip rhyme and an abrupt meter change. Only Bacharach, for instance, could interpose the cheerful mood of "Do You Know the Way to San Jose?" with its underlying theme of disillusionment and the unspoken death of big dreams; while the arrangement glistens...
Elvis Costello, angry young punk, might seem an odd sort to collaborate with a composer of sugary and sophisticated pop songs. However, his abilities as a songwriter, even in his early and admirable punk work, tended towards surprising revelations and explorations of the dark sides of love and politics; he even cited Bacharach and David as influences on his post-punk swaggering forays into murky emotions. Like Bacharach, Costello composes music that can quiver like shifting sands, leaning gently into a tremor of eloquence and anguish...
...retro female background singers. Only when Bacharach stretches his orchestrations into more rock-oriented territory does the music suggest outtakes from the schmaltzy Michael MacDonald recordings from the mid-80s. Few of the songs, though, sound so maudlin, and the melodies themselves stay thoroughly grounded in reality; these pop songs may be old-fashioned, but they sound far from melodramatic or artificial. Heartbreak itself, after all, is awfully old-fashioned, but it always feels fresh...