One raucous and noisy show from Napoleon Dynamite3 Out Of 5 Stars
On his latest live excessive exercise, Elvis Costello and his Imposters (Steve Nieve, Pete Thomas and Davey Faragher) haul out The Spectacular Spinning Songbook. Costello has done variations of this format before, where an audience member spins the wheel and a random song will come up (or when I saw it, the pulled and 'arrow' from a broken heart that had a song attached), and the band tears into the random selections. It makes for a fun show, with oddities appearing, some of Costello's favorite oldies (in this show, Nick Lowe's "Heart of The City" and The Rolling Stones' "Out of Time") making appearances. Even better, for me, anyhow, is Costello going all torch singer on "God Give Me Strength."
Problem is, it makes for performances of varying quality. In this case, the sound was the victim. The concert is a noisy, raucous affair with the distorted sound of a decent bootleg. While this may annoy many audiophiles, it just makes the show more fun to me. In my opinion, the quality of "Songbook" betters that of the classic "El Macambo" set from the late 70's that many hold to be classic. Just a mater of tastes, and in my taste, hearing Susanna Hoffs come up to knock out the Bangles' version of EC's "Doll Revolution" made this worth the cost.
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