Elvis Costello & the Attractions: Blood & Chocolate

Elvis Costello & the Attractions: Blood & Chocolate

1986

Columbia Records

Format I Own it on: Vinyl and Compact Disc

Track Listing: 1. Uncomplicated  2. I Hope You're Happy Now  3.Tokyo Storm Warning  4. Home Is Anywhere You Hang Your Head  5. I Want You  6. Honey, Are You Straight or Are You Blind?  7. Blue Chair  8. Battered Old Bird  9. Crimes of Paris  10. Poor Napoleon  11. Next Time Round

Disc 2 (2002 Rhino CD reissue ): 1. Leave My Kitten Alone  2. New Rhythm Method  3. Forgive Her Anything  4. Crimes of Paris  5. Uncomplicated  6. Battered Old Bird  7. Seven Day Weekend (with Jimmy Cliff)  8. Blue Chair (Single Version)  9. Baby's Got a Brand New Hairdo  10. American Without Tears No. 2  11. All These Things  12. Pouring Water on a Drowning Man  13. Running Out of Fools  14. Tell Me Right Now  15. Lonely Blue Boy




I don't know if you can tell just by reading this, but I've been sick as hell all week...I kind of just want to lie in bed and moan all day, so forgive me if the posts this week have been more incoherent than usual (which I'm sure is highly unlikely...I tend to run a pretty incoherent ship here...) Alright, here we go...Let's take a look at this here "Blood & Chocolate" Record...

Oh yea, have you guys ever seen the limited cassette tape version of this? So freakin' ballin'...Check this out...

It looks like a candy bar! I want to eat it so bad right about now! See, I went to the  doctor's office last weekend (totally unrelated to my current cold/flu) and the doctor took one look at my blood pressure and seriously told me, "You could die any second! Go to the emergency room immediately!"  One would think the doctor would be able to help me out with such a thing, but I'm no doctor, so...Anyway, I'd been through this before...I had gone to the emergency room before and when they took one look at my stats and said, "Go to a regular doctors office!" Then I went to the regular doctor and they kind of just shrugged...Long story short, I have to stop doing everything in life I enjoy...So I haven't had beer, meat, cheese, pop, or fun all week...

 It actually wasn't as hard as I thought, so far...I'm one of those odd people who just naturally enjoys  bean sprouts and tofu...So theoretically, I shouldn't be in such bad shape, but I've picked up some nasty habits in my life...Here's what my diet looked like last week (when I was much happier)...

Wake up! Drink a 40 oz of Pepsi and eat a bag of salty-ass peanuts for breakfast...

Hear that whistle? It's time for lunch...Let's snap into a Sasquatch-sized Slim Jim and 5 cups of coffee!

Alright...It's time to go home and make myself dinner...Let's do a couple cans of Coke, a frozen pizza and 6-8 beers!

Apparently, doing this everyday for 30-odd years is fatal. Who knew?

The hardest thing now is not being full after I eat dinner...It's like, alright, I'll eat an orange for dinner, but goddamn, I eat it and my stomach growls so I'm like, "Ah, what the hell...Let's do another orange..." and so on...It's very possible I might end up gaining 100 pounds from eating oranges alone...But how can you not be hungry after you eat it? It's an orange...

Maybe if you peeled it and there was a nice, juicy meatball underneath, but no! There's nothing but fruit underneath that peel! Again, I have nothing against oranges...I happen to love them, but not for lunch...I like them between bags of Doritos...But I'm trying not to die, so I do it...And what happens? I get sick as a dog! Sicker than a dog actually...Most dogs I know seem to be pretty healthy.! Wait, what was I talking about? Oh yea, I want to eat that Elvis Costello cassette...But I don't have that cassette...I have a regular looking vinyl and CD version, but my version's pretty cool cos it says "Napoleon Dynamite" on it!

Napoleon Dynamite was another one of Elvis Costello's aliases that he used during this time period, along with his real name Declan MacManus (who gets most of the song-writing credits) ...I don't see the Little Hands of Concrete listed this time around, though..

This is my jam. Elvis Costello has a huge discography, but this one has always risen to the top for me...Second only to "Armed Forces" and tied with "This Year's Model." Why does this appeal to me so much? I don't know. On the surface it doesn't sound like a good time: Long, noisy, wordy tracks featuring the bitter recriminations of a recently divorced man just seething with anger and occasionally breaking for forced, joyless fun...But despite all this I always have such fun listening to "Blood & Chocolate"...And I don't think it's good fun either...It's the kind of fun you have where you look back year's later and say, "Man, that was fucked up..."

The album reunites Elvis with the Attractions, after doing "King of America," without them, although they too would be going through their own divorce soon enough (and not return until 1994's "Brutal Truth").  Oh, and Nick Lowe is back on production duties, but this doesn't sound like it did before...It's louder, booming, nastier and Elvis' vocals sound so close that you can practically feel his hot breath coming out of your speakers during the more intense moments...And things get intense immediately with the opening tack "Uncomplicated" which sets the scene with a pounding racket and Elvis shouting his fool head off about a "horse that knows arithmetic and a dog that tells your fortune..." or some such thing...I think we might have caught him on a bad day!

Then "I Hope You're Happy Now" comes on and it sounds like things are lightening up a touch...It's  sort of a noisier version of nice Merseybeat pop, but then you start noticing that Elvis sounds like he's having a little too much fun and suddenly the lyrics register:

"I knew then what I know now.
 I never loved you anyhow,
and I hope you're happy now.."

Then we're on to the album's first masterpiece..."Tokyo Storm Warning" is a six and a half minute travelogue that takes us to some pretty unsavory places...A hotel bar hosting a KKK convention, Japanese palaces gilded with the gold teeth of pensioners, the main streets of Italy where the streets are littered with dead tourists...Every verse is a packed with vivid gallows-humor imagery...I've been listening to this album for over a decade now and I'm still picking up on new meanings in the lyrics...

Like the day I found out the "God-Jesus" robots were a real thing!

The second masterpiece closes out side one...They've got to make "I Want You" the divorcee's official anthem...I'm serious! When you go to Divorce Court, they should make you stand and put your right hand over your heart while this pipes out of the PA speakers and the honorable Lynn Toler pounds out the beat on her gavel...

Just a big, tense ball of jealousy, ache and resentment...Undeniably based on "I Want You (She's So Heavy) by the Beatles (so I guess Elvis can't get too upset about the whole Napoleon Dynamite movie stealing his name), this thing is just a triumph of production and arrangement...Most notably the part at the end when they shut off all the mic's except the vocal mic...Is there a window open? Cos I got the chills (rim-shot...Audience groans and suddenly turns on me...A villager lights up a torch...Another holds aloft a pitchfork and burns down the decrepit windmill where I live...)

Oh yea, then there's the third masterpiece..."Battered Old Bird." If I had to pick a single favorite Elvis Costello song, this one is it...It's almost startling when you listen to the alternate take on the bonus disc and hear that it was originally a fun-lovin' uptempo rock song, because the final version couldn't be more unrelated...Somehow the group arrives at a beautifully detailed, slow-moving  portrait of the tenants of a building young Elvis inhabited as a child...I'm fascinated by how the hushed accompaniment gets more tense and uncomfortable until it finally explodes into a hair-raising scream for the final chorus...Man, I wish I had neighbors this interesting...

I had some neighbors who tried to sell me AK-47's while outlining how they could easily break into my apartment and kill me and steal my stuff...I guess that guy was cool...Then he tried to steal a pair of slippers cos he said he needed them for the strip club...

Oh yea, I had this other really drunken neighbor that forced his way into the house, picked up my guitar and tried to write a song with the AK-47 guy...The drunk guy was plucking the strings tenderly and the AK-47 dude started rapping, "Yo! She's lookin' like she want to suck a dick!" Then the drunk guy stopped playing and looked at the other neighbor and said, "No, no, no...This is a beautiful song...It's about this guy who wants this girl but it's like she's always a million miles away..."

The AK-47 guy looked up wistfully, like he understood deeply, and cooed, "Yeeeaaaa....Like she's a million miles away..."

Then drunk guy starts playing again and AK-47 man starts rapping, "Yo! She's lookin' like she want to suck my dick..."

Then AK-47 man tried walking down the stairs, Four Loko in hand, then fell flat on his back and tumbled down an entire flight of concrete stairs, the back of his head bouncing off of every step...

 "Oh goody, maybe he's dead, " I thought to myself..

No such luck...He gets up like nothing happened and goes in his apartment, and is then promptly arrested and sent to prison a month later for possession of AK-47's..."Why do you let these people into your home?" I ask myself...

Hmmm...Maybe I should write a song about my neighbors...Maybe  a rap song called, "Slippers in the Strip Club..." Wait! I just remembered something else about those neighbors! He was always standing outside free-styling raps...Here are a couple of the choice line I overheard:

"Yo! We be gettin' bigger than J-Lo's butt!"

"Eagle-eyed like a hawk! The Incredible Hulk!"

Boy have I gotten off-topic today...Did I even talk about "Blood & Chocolate"? It's hard to remember...If not, it's a good record...My favorite, actually...All the songs are good...Here's "I Want You (She's So Heavy) by Elvis Costello...