Elvis Presley, “Viva Elvis: The Album” (RCA/Legacy)
Cirque du Soleil is all about dramatic, over-the-top spectacle spiked with intimate pauses, so it’s no surprise the Montreal company adopted the multihued music of Elvis Presley for its latest production.
“Viva Elvis: The Album” contains songs from the show running at Aria Resort & Casino in Las Vegas, but to call it an Elvis Presley album is a stretch. The producers chop up Presley’s songs into thousands of digital samples and recontextualize them with new arrangements and mixes.
Casting well-known melodies and riffs in a new light is an admirable enterprise, and here it’s done with enough nuance to prevent any of the tracks from sounding too jarring. The bubbly version of “That’s All Right” gives it a bite that recalls both the Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” and Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life,” while a reworked “Suspicious Mind” sounds, oddly, like the Killers covering early-period U2.
At best it’s a fun, inessential piece of merchandise for Presley fans and those who haven’t seen the Cirque live show. At worst, it’s a dated and disposable exploitation of an already picked-over corpse.
Of course, it’s tough to argue that any new iteration of Presley’s work tarnishes his legacy, given the already relentless reappropriation of it. But for all its fleeting, sugary pleasures, “Viva Elvis” just feels too calculated to inspire anything beyond bemusement. John Wenzel
Weezer, “Pinkerton: Deluxe Edition” (DGC) Weezer seems to take pleasure in messing with its fans — especially when the band has our full attention, as it has in recent months with constant touring, a horrendous new album (“Hurley”), an odds-and-ends collection (“Death to False Metal”) and the two-disc reissue of its 1996 classic, “Pinkerton.”
But why is the band giving the deluxe treatment to an album that frontman Rivers Cuomo once called “hideous”?
Why not? “Pinkerton” was the band’s high point in terms of both songwriting and sincerity, and it’s weathered its 14 years exceedingly well. Following Weezer’s multiplatinum 1994 debut, Cuomo went in a moodier direction for “Pinkerton,” wielding chunky riffs and twisted melodies like medieval weapons instead of marching batons.
The palpable rage and self-doubt of “Why Bother?” and “The Good Life” sound as pained and relevant as they did in 1996, though it’s easy to see why the self-obsessed Cuomo would second-guess putting his emotions out there so nakedly.
Before the first disc is over we get radio remixes and killer B-sides such as “Waiting on You” and the gorgeous “I Just Threw Out the Love of My Dreams,” while the second disc is stuffed with acoustic versions and previously unreleased live tracks.
“Pinkerton” sounds great not just because Weezer has yet to match its artistic highs, but because the deluxe treatment gives us a new appreciation of the churning creative period that produced it.
Despite what Cuomo would have his fans believe, this album was no fluke. John Wenzel
