August 16 - All This Useless Beauty

I've found that it is easier to organize my weeks by a theme. I know, the themes don't always make sense, but as I am looking at my Amazon music collection (I store it all in the cloud, and their services are great as far as I am concerned - their cloud player has really worked well for me), the number of songs I have at my disposal is so large that without a theme, it becomes a lot more difficult to decide what to play. It's like any writing assignment - write whatever you want to is a lot more difficult than writing about an assignment ("og alle var enige om at det hadde vært en fin tur" - "and everybody agreed they had a nice trip" - the quintessential ending of any and all Norwegian essay about what we did on our summer vacations). This week, I think I am heading for title tracks.

The interesting thing for me about today's song, All This Useless Beauty by Elvis Costello, is that I barely have listened to the full album.  I had a huge Elvis Costello phase where I thought I needed as much of his music as possible. I still really like his music, but I have come to the conclusion that not every idea you have should make an album, and that is what I sometimes think he has suffered from. All This Useless Beauty is one of his albums that only has a couple of great songs on it. The rest are solid, but nothing special. It is also a fitting end to The Attractions - this album was the last one he recorded with his initial backing band. His current band, The Imposters, is really an upgrade of The Attractions, with Steve Nieve on keyboards, Pete Thomas on drums, and Davey Faragher replacing Bruce Thomas, whom Elvis Costello reportedly has said it is impossible to work with anymore, on bass.

However, while All This Useless Beauty might fall short as a whole, the title track is really worth the price of the album in itself. I find it hauntingly beautiful.