All This Useless Beauty. June Tabor. 1992. Green Linnet.

 The Elvis Costello version of All This Useless Beauty is an elegiac waltz sung with a heartful, tender sympathy. Costello floods his voice with so much emotion that your responses are flattened, but Steve Nieve’s virtuoso piano accompaniment, though played for irony, recalls the quietly assured strength of the late Bill Evans. By contrast, June Tabor’s rendition is a masterwork of emotional restraint. Tabor narrates the tale of a businessman’s wife who, after a row with her husband, surveys a history of the intermingling of the sexes both through her feelings and her home’s collection of books and films and paintings. Her investigation yields the deeply held truth that over time she’s allowed herself to be used and undervalued, an institutional tradition of marriage that has reduced both spouses to something less than human, mere archetypes beyond the reach of great art. Written by Costello especially for the great English vocalist, it’s a challenging lyric, but Tabor simplifies her recitation, seizing the listener’s attention with a quiet authority that gains dramatic momentum as the wife’s emotion intensifies. By song’s end you’re in the grip of a pathos so harrowingly, hypnotically told that you’ll feel yourself transfixed and unsettled and not just a little embarrassed by the depth of confession you’ve plumbed. It isn’t often that a pop song gazes back into you with the acuteness of a Nietzschean abyss. 


March 24 022

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