An Everyday Mess

I can never listen to Blood and Chocolate without thinking about EC’s description of it for the liner notes of the Rykodisc reissue: “...a forty-year-old divorcee’s version of This Year’s Model.”

That’s it, exactly. Like his songwriting on the 1978 album, Costello returns on Blood and Chocolate to a style that pairs poetic abstraction alongside documentary detail. Let’s linger for a moment on this opening stanza: 

EC covers incredible ground in five lines. It’s full of imagery–those “tiny children in grown-up clothes”!--but also that opening triplet that makes a mockery of hope, an “optimist’s view of the clock.”

But “Crimes of Paris” doesn’t linger in my mind because of EC’s clever lyrics. No, it lingers for two reasons. First, there’s the ghostly presence of Pogues bassist and songwriter Cait O’Riordan on backing vocals; the two were married as this was being recorded. Usually Costello’s able to document the kremlinology of love and lust with solely his own voice to carry the tune; adding a female vocalist to the track casts the usual bon mots into a harsher light. It’s not as easy to forget there’s an actual woman in the repertory company of his characters when you start to hear from her directly. 

And then there’s the bridge. In terms of arrangement, “Crimes of Paris” adopts a bouncy acoustic pop flavor from the opening chords, a tone embodied in Bruce Thomas’ trampoline bass line and the chiming keys of Steve Nieve. 

The bridge introduces a new element, a backing chorus riding a single note with what sounds like the word “Go.” It cuts into the mood from the moment it begins; it gets a brief respite as the chorus changes to EC himself howling a quick descending vocal riff for a few bars. 

And then that chorus comes back, suddenly overpowering the rest of the song. It sounds like it’s disintegrating even as it gets louder; it’s not just a chorus of voices but separate voices untangling as you listen, landing harder and harder, like the pop equivalent of Bernard Hermann’s bristling string motif from Hitchcock’s Psycho. 

THEN a bright little instrumental transition, and we’re back. 

EC uses the arrangement itself to inject an undercurrent of fear and dread into a portrait of a relationship in decay. The whole thing is a “paperweight Eiffel Tower,” a shabby disintegrating copy of something beautiful and romantic.