10. Glenn Danzig, Danzig Sings Elvis (Cleopatra). Maybe not quite as far back as his punk days with the Misfits, but Glenn Danzig has threatened this record for decades. He falls short, or apart, with Sun rockabilly or well-known RCA material (“Baby Let’s Play House,” “When It Rains It Really Pours,” and “One Night”), but with his voice as full and deep as it can go, on ballads — not the ballad as Bob Dylan talked about it, but straightforward manufactured pop love songs — he inhabits levels of subtlety, doubt, certainty, and despair that Elvis didn’t allow himself.The accompaniment is minimal, a fuzz guitar and backing vocals removed to a faraway, echoey dankness, and Danzig stills the room. “Is It So Strange” is not of this world; it seems somehow suspended between Elvis’s death and whenever the singer’s might be.
The heart of the music is in the many ballads slipped in as filler on Elvis soundtracks and throwaway albums that now live lives they never lived before, even when you could hear in Elvis’s own singing an implicit admission of how little he cared about the songs, or a listener’s apprehension of how much the songs wanted more: “Lonely Blue Boy,” “First in Line,” “Pocketful of Rainbows,” “Loving Arms,” “Young and Beautiful,” which closed Jailhouse Rock in 1957 — a song it’s hard to credit anyone would try again after the way Aaron Neville sent it to heaven in a live performance included on the bizarre 1990 tribute album The Last Temptation of Elvis: Songs from His Movies. But “Love Me,” played so slowly it’s hard to take, could be the one. The bridge — the I would beg and steal — so barely varies the song it doesn’t actually register as any kind of musical shift. The song is all on one plane, as if there is only one truth in life, as if for a moment someone glimpsed it.
― but also fuck you (unperson), Saturday, 23 May 2020 00:42 (three years ago) link