It's a pain to come up with a way to approach a review to this album that's not just "I like these songs" and "I like these songs less." With a gun to my head, I'd say my favorite is "Blame it on Cain," which is a top-notch tribute to 50s rock, but there are a few top-notch tributes to 50s rock here; "Miracle Man" (firmly in the upbeat 50s rock camp) and "No Dancing" (50s balladry grafted onto a more modern anthemic rock sensibility) are at the top of the pile, while "Sneaky Feelings," "Mystery Dance," and "Pay it Back" are decent 50s tributes but definitely a step down. "Alison" is a quiet ballad with some 50s elements in it as well, and it's a highlight as well, even if the guitar noodly coda is weirdly overlong given the length of the rest of the song.

The other six songs aren't massive departures from the approach established in the bulk of the album, but they're different enough to give the album enough variety to keep it from seeming too stale. "Welcome to the Working Week" is an extremely punkish start to an album that immediately thereafter hits the retro approach hard; the first ten seconds are perfectly in the retro vibe, but as soon as Elvis goes into the "All you gotta tell me now is WHY WHY WHY WHY?" part it's definitely a low-key punk song with a message that would resonate with all 9-5 workers, and it wraps up in a tidy 1:23 without feeling artificially rushed at all. "(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes" is a low-key anthemic pop-rocker that turns GREAT once Elvis locks into the coda of singing the title near the end; even if it's not my favorite track on the album, this is the one, to me, that most clearly previews what Elvis would be capable of pulling off in subsequent albums. "Less Than Zero" is a song that I don't find as great as its reputation suggests (the lyrics are very interesting but the actual music sounds weirdly stiff to me), and the next two songs ("Pay it Back" and "Mystery Dance") are just ok, but at least the album ends on a clearly high note. "I'm Not Angry" (with a whispered "Angry!" appearing every time the word "angry" is sung) is a rather ominous rocker with some energetic and angry guitar throughout, "Waiting for the End of the World" is a Dylan/Stones-ish blues-rock pounder (filtered through a punk lens) with some nice slide guitar popping up from time to time, and the closing (at least in the US; the UK version ended with "Waiting for the End of the World") "Watching the Detectives" is a reggae-inflected number about (I think) an attractive girl who enjoys watching a police procedural, though I'm probably completely off about this.

All in all, this is a very nice album, and yet I'd hate to think that somebody would start their Elvis Costello exposure with this one. It's just a little too devoted to one particular approach (which is done at a good but not great level), and even just a year later he'd start going far beyond the baseline standard established here. Still, it's a very impressive way to start, and it's to his credit that he could jump so far beyond this good level.

MATTHEW CONSTANTINE (02/13/17)

I don't think it's accurate to characterize any of EC's early albums as "punk", and this one least of all - its 50s and early-to-mid 60s influences are too apparent, from the songs and arrangements right through to the production.

"Mystery Dance" suffers from the loss of the original last verse, which is on the acoustic demo - the one where he starts to imagine talking to God about his sexual problem, then instantly realises God would be the least qualified person to talk to. Some of the acoustic demos really ought to have been developed further - Elvis later developed a fondness for "Poison Moon", but I prefer "Wave A White Flag", that 1920s-style tune about domestic violence.

Nice to see someone speak up for "Pay It Back", a memorable song that's usually overlooked by critics.

Some people prefer the so-called Dallas version of "Less Than Zero" (added to some reissues), for which he rewrites the lyric to refer to the supposed assassin of John F Kennedy. The melodic discontinuity between the pre-chorus bridge and the chorus (i.e the "hey!"s) remains intact.

Holy cow The Attractions were a way better backing band for Elvis Costello than Clover was. There's a retro flavor to The Attractions, just as there was a retro flavor to Clover, but the retro flavor of The Attractions is just one of many flavors therein, whereas the retro flavor of Clover on My Aim is True was a central part of the schtick. With this album, Elvis and his band embraced the ambiguous boundary between Punk Rock and New Wave, filling the album with paranoid and often angry music that's usually at least one of intense and speedy, with a smattering of contrasting material to keep the sound from getting too montonous. The instrument that ends up standing out most is the organ (courtesy of keyboardist Steve Nieve), which has the tone of something from the 50s but is hyperactive in a way that sounds very contemporary, and it makes for a fantastic addition to the standard guitar/bass/drums instrumentation. The overall sound created on this album is just dripping with individual personality; in many ways, the sound of this album would end up becoming a stand-in proxy for that of New Wave in general, and it might be tempting because of that to just think of this album has having "a typical New Wave sound," but don't do that! This is the New Wave sound (at least the more energetic, snappy and angry side of it), and for that it deserves praise, not any sort of push-back.

This album doesn't so much have "filler" (nothing on here gives the sense of a toss-off, as everything seems very carefully considered) as it has tracks that aren't as impactful as the major highlights. "You Belong to Me," "Hand in Hand," and "Lip Service" sound to me like they could have belonged to the previous album with some small rearranging, and while that's not exactly an insult, these tracks nonetheless give me the sense of the album having a bit of a lull tucked into the middle of it (even if, within this stretch, we have one of the album's main highlights). They're brisk and fun and snide and all those things typically thought of with this album, but they don't transcend those basic characteristics the way so much of the rest of this album does.

In contrast, the rest of this album varies in quality from impressive to transcendent, and they boost the album to an upper-level D for me. The opening "No Action" pulls the great trick of starting with Elvis' voice solo in one channel before bursting in with the full instrumentation, and the catchiness and energy of the rest of the song helps make it into a classic. "This Year's Girl" stars Pete Thomas (drums), who pounds his interesting beat as hard as he can while Elvis rails against the ephemeral nature of commercial trends, and the whole song is a delight, right down to the mid-section that's a purposeful crib of "Stupid Girl" (by the Rolling Stones) and that strikes me as a clever homage much more than any sort of cheap ripoff. "The Beat" stars Nieve and his organ in the bulk of the song, especially in those fun up-and-down parts, but it's the way the vaguely uncomfortable lyrics (such as "I don't wanna be a lover / I just wanna be your victim") mingle with a song that can't seem to make up its mind as to whether it's in major or minor that really makes the song stand out for me. "Pump it Up" is basically Elvis singing about his penis in a veiled way over a pounding beat, but somehow the song is able to come off as something more significant than just that description, and I can't imagine the album without this ode to frustrated self-pleasure. Rounding out the first side (aside from "You Belong to Me") is "Little Triggers," a very rousing bit of white-boy soul, with Elvis waxing rhapsodic over all of the little details that can drive you crazy with lust in a newly found source of infatuation, and whether it's earnest or sarcastic (and honestly it's probably a bit of both) it works amazingly.

Side two starts with "Hand in Hand" and follows with "Lip Service" a couple of tracks later, but sandwiched between them is "(I Don't Want to Go to) Chelsea," an angry dose of reggae-tinged punk rock (the piercing guitar line that comes up over and over again is an absolute winner) about a bad side of London, full of prostitutes and pornographic film studios and what not. I can't even begin to try and parse the exact literal meaning of the lyrics here, and I'm not sure I need to; even without knowing specifics, I can tell that the song is dripping with disgust and lust and rage and all sorts of emotions that, when mixed together, make you feel just gross, and that seems to be the point. How the hell did this song get bumped for the US release???

After "Lip Service," we come to "Living in Paradise," a relatively lightweight number that nonetheless stands out because it's lightweight in a less conventional way than "Lip Service" or the like. The keyboard parts are among the goofiest on the album, but they work, and the mix of the awkward (in a good way) standard instrumentation with the smidge of slide guitar and Elvis' lyrics that either peg him as a jealous lover or as a stalker is quite intriguing. Where "Living in Paradise" works as the sort of track that can pass you by initially but grab you after a few additional listens, then, "Lipstick Vogue" works as hard as it can to make everybody notice it and pay attention to it the first time, and it's a total success on all counts. The whole band is on full throttle in terms of energy here, with Elvis keeping up by spitting out his venom in the verses and trying to do some things with his voice that he probably shouldn't try (because he's just so riled up), and the mid-section where the the band lets the threat of a long jam hang there for a while (they never make good on the threat but the presence of the threat is enough) is probably the best instrumental stretch on an album full of great minimalist instrumental stretches.

"Night Rally" would have been an odd way to end the album (as it did originally), but it works well as a fake ending (as it does in my version), and the slow ascent out of the verses into the chorus is a strong enough moment to justify the song (which is a little dull otherwise, but only a little). And finally, "Radio, Radio" (which gained its greatest fame as the song the band broke into when they got themselves banned from Saturday Night Live for a decade) is just a monster of a New Wave rocker, featuring an amazing organ riff in the instrumental breaks and an incredibly angry delivery of an incredibly angry set of lyrics about censorship and the media setting itself up as a purveyor of truth when it's actually been compromised and is anything but. The way the song plays off of "God Save the Queen" is rather cute as well.

I wouldn't want somebody to buy only one Elvis Costello album (if that happened that would mean they hadn't heard Armed Forces for instance), but if you're only going to buy one EC album, it pretty much has to be this one. Elvis would write some songs later on that would top some of the better songs on here, yes, but as a full-throated statement of purpose, asserting in both music and lyrics that he and his band were important and worth paying attention to, there isn't a better choice.

MATTHEW CONSTANTINE (02/13/17)

Not one of my favorites - despite its historical importance, to me it's the album which feels most constrained / pushed-into-monotony by Steve Nieve with his limited musical phrasebook and even more limited stock of keyboard timbres.

Not much to say about the lyrics - by his standards they're mostly simplistic. Except the following:

EC has always professed bewilderment at the way people read misogynistic overtones into his songs about the fashion modelling world and the unethical behavior that goes on within it ("...Chelsea" and "This Year's Girl").

"Pump It Up" is not about masturbation - the title refers to shooting up speed. it's basically the observations of the most sober person at a party (on the Live Stiffs tour, I think) where everyone else is either on drugs or getting drunk. (To use EC's phrase: it's about "an evening of assisted insomnia").

After the major breakthrough of This Year's Model, it's remarkable that Costello and The Attractions, far from making an album that replicates the successes of that one, would instead seek to make an album that is almost a complete inverse of that one (and, in the process, a perfect complement to that one). A terrific observation I once read concerning these two albums is that This Year's Model is a series of punk-flavored performances about romantic and social (small-scale) interactions, whereas Armed Forces is a series of lush poppy performances about political and international and social (large-scale) interactions, and I completely agree with this. Quite honestly, while I have long settled on This Year's Model as my favorite, there are a couple of moments, every time I listen to this album, when I'm ready to name it as my favorite; after all, my instincts lean more towards the lush than the lean, and there are some GREAT LUSH MOMENTS on this album. Of course, then I remember that there are some long stretches where the album plateaus at a level of "pretty good," and while these aren't enough to sway me from my feeling that this album has elements of greatness, they are enough to make me temper my assessment of the album just a little bit. But only a little bit.

As on its predecessor, this album starts off extremely well. "Accidents Will Happen" is one of Costello's best songs, even if on some "objective" level it could have been better with a more traditionally talented singer. The big instrumental star of this one is the echoey piano, intertwined with the majestic synths for flavor, but the tune itself is just a lovely one, gliding up and down and never ceasing to be memorable. The following "Senior Service" starts off sounding somewhat similar to something from This Year's Model thanks to the self-consciously quirky keyboard part, but it goes in a direction that never would have been considered on that album; it intermittently becomes a big shiny disco song, and it's both an utter crackup and an utter delight. It is indescribable how ridiculous and fun it is to hear Elvis sing "I want your company car / I want your girlfriend and love / I want your place at the bar / Because there's always another man / To chop off your head and watch it roll into the basket / If you should drop dead tonight then they won't have to ask me twice" while I imagine somebody in a white disco suit getting down on the dance floor to this. "Oliver's Army" is basically a full-fledged piano-heavy ABBA song from start to finish, but instead of the lightweight lyrics one would typically expect from an ABBA song (not that there's anything wrong with those lightweight lyrics!), you get a sharp and well-articulated critique of the overuse of military forces by major military powers.

If the album held up this pace, of course, I would have to think about bumping up the overall rating significantly, but alas, there are only a couple of other tracks here that I love quite as much. "Goon Squad" is an all-out Spector-ish assault of big keyboards and echoey backing vocals and everything nice, in service of a big anthem about a soldier writing home to his parents who finds that war isn't quite what he expected, and it's an excellent centerpiece for the album. The closing cover (originally written by Nick Lowe, the producer) of "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding?" is another classic, a strong mid-tempo anthem with Elvis building his verse rants into an unforgettable and uplifting chorus, and whenever it finishes I feel the momentary need to go out and try to save the world somehow. As great as these five tracks, are, the other eight seem like a step down, in that they just don't have as much impact on me as I remember the album as a whole having on me. The best of the remainder is "Party Girl," but that's largely because of its crib (probably purposeful) of the guitars in "Carry That Weight," and while that's not the only interesting feature of it, it's definitely the feature I remember most. Of the rest, I guess I prefer the amusing off-kilter circus music of "Sunday's Best" (full of very cynical lyrics as well) or the rock-reggae fascist musings of "Two Little Hitlers" (is that a crib of "Rebel Rebel" or is that descending guitar line too simplistic to qualify as a crib?), and the rest is ... fine. They're not enough to draw me into namechecking every song on the album, but they're all worth hearing from time to time even if they pale in comparison to the best parts of the album.

Regardless of the fact that I'm moderately lukewarm-to-positive on about half of the album, the best tracks of the album, and the overall approach to the album, are impressive enough to me that I feel no concern about giving it such a high rating. One thing I would definitely recommend, if you can find time for it, is to listen to This Year's Model and Armed Forces back-to-back; the contrasts between them really make the strengths of each stand out in a more pronounced manner.

MATTHEW CONSTANTINE (02/13/17)

This album took time to grow on me. At first I thought it was suffering from "the Nieve problem" (see above) but of course it's a bit better than TYM - at least he's using synths and piano more, varying the sound.

It seems EC had developed a bit of a fixation on "inverted cliches" - this is the album that gives us "a death worse than fate" and "in a grip like Vice" within the space of fifteen minutes! And it's the first instance I remember of his penchant for titles which change their meanings, mid-song:witness "nothin' but a party girl...[next verse] you're not the guilty party, girl".

Good bonus tracks - "Wednesday Week", bit of Animals pastiche, "Clean Money", the more hard-rocking prototype for "Love For Tender", and one edition has the Hollywood High live broadcast in its entirety.

The general approach to this album has its roots in an infamous incident on the Armed Forces tour, where Costello got drunk and used racial epithets in public to describe James Brown and Ray Charles. The oversimplified version of what ensued is that Costello made this album as a form of atonement for his public racism, and while I don't think reality is quite this pat (and Costello denied a direct cause and effect in the liner notes of a later reissue), I do think that the process got him at least thinking about moving his sound in a direction that more openly acknowledged African American musical influences. The album is full of R&B and soul influences (there are definitely no blues influences, though), but don't make the mistake of thinking that this will be some sort of Exile on Main Street sort of hyper-authentic roots rock experience; this album absolutely sounds like the same late 70s white boy music ensemble that made the last couple of albums, only with them trying to make music they enjoy but don't entirely understand. On paper, this could have resulted in something atrocious, but it actually ends up sounding quite interesting, and what the band lacks in authenticity it makes up for with a sound that's definitely all their own. Neither the singing nor the production really lend themselves well to this kind of music, but the band manages to make a bad fit into an intriguing bad fit. In terms of lyrics, it's full of intricate wordplay and big elaborate rants about lots of things, but I think there's merit in Costello's later statement that, around this time, his word-smithing had become a little bit self-parodic. He might have been the closest thing to a New Wave Dylan, but you can't try to be a New Wave Dylan ...

Anyway, when I consider this album song by song, I find that I like a lot of material on here. The first group of five songs gets off to a roaring start with "Love For Tender," which combines ultra-energetic bass (this is a common theme of the album; everybody in the Attractions sounds great on here, but Bruce Thomas and his bass playing is shockingly prominent and interesting) and ultra-energetic organ work to create the first of many great R&B exercises on this album. Of this group, I'm also a big fan of "Opportunity" (an unforgettable vocal melody over organ parts that seem to be skipping with delight in the background), "Imposter" (less memorable but oh so much addictive energy) and "King Horse" (especially the rich piano in the introduction and later), while "Secondary Modern" is just a pleasant organ-heavy shuffle with a quiet vocal. Among the next group of five songs, I'm a big fan of the first and last tracks: "Posession" is a moving soul number with a terrific organ riff in the chorus, and "High Fidelity" features a winner of a vocal melody (but not a winner of a vocal performance; Costello is a little rough here even by his standards) that's somewhat muted in favor of more great piano and bass parts that I always glom onto when listening to this. Of the other three in this group, I'm somewhat partial to to "Clowntime Is Over," another organ-heavy mid-tempo power pop song, and "New Amsterdam" is a nice ballad with the acoustic guitar pushed up front and the organ pushed back a bit, while "Man Called Uncle" becomes interesting to me in the "When you WAKE UP ..." part but otherwise eludes me somewhat.

The third chunk of five songs, while not bad, is a moderate slog. It gets off to a good start with the Motown cover of "I Cant Stand Up for Falling Down," but "Motel Matches" has never struck me as much more than an ok soul number; in the other tracks, the only part that ends up sticking out to me is the interesting jazzy bassline in "B Movie." The last chunk of five songs, though, is terrific, and it helps me to end up regarding the album more highly than I might if these tracks were spread elsewhere. "Human Touch" is a fun bit of upbeat jaunty organ-heavy music, "Beaten to the Punch" is basic rock'n'roll (once again with the organ and the bass pumped up) done at a high level, "Temptation" is yet another top-notch power pop song (I'm pretty much out of descriptions at this point, so sue me), "I Stand Accused" is a fun up-tempo cover of a song from an early 70s rock band called Heads Hands & Feet, and finally it all comes to a head with "Riot Act." If there's a song on this album that can definitely be traced back to the scandal of Costello's drunken rant, it's this one, a soul-inflected epic anthem full of self-flagellating passion. The singing is really great on this one, in addition to all of the great work from everybody else.

If you've listened to the first three and aren't totally sold on them, but you don't necessarily think that you hate Costello, you should listen to this album before you render final judgement on Costello. Apart from the voice and the organ, this album sounds nothing like the three that precede it, and it's really impressive to see just how much ground he'd been able to cover at a fairly successful level at such an early stage in his career. Personally, I find it hard to see how somebody wouldn't at least like half of this.

MATTHEW CONSTANTINE (02/13/17)

I could go into a rant likening the Columbus Bar Incident to Donald Trump's car park incident - but I won't waste your time on that. Suffice to say: in my opinion neither man had anything to apologise for. And my reasons for that are firstly linguistic and secondarily sociopolitical.

Anyway - at least one biographer has doubted that "Riot Act" is really about that, and I tend to agree. The talk was not "topical" that night, and the middle-eight might be about wanting to be left alone in a bar, but it might not. Maybe he wrote the sng just because he was itching to use the "heart on sleeve / off-the-cuff" couplet.

He may argue that there was too much wordplay on this album but I look on it as EC finding his verbal niche. And if the puns and word-associatiosn are as clever and appropriate as this, keep 'em coming!

BTW: He'd been going through some legal problems. Dodgy management and the resultant jumping between record labels: in three years he'd moved from Stiff to F-Beat to Radar to Demon, plus a short stint on [what else!] 2-Tone. So it's no wonder several songs have "money" imagery running through them - "King Horse" being the best of these, what with the Motown-gone-wrong riff, and the "in a mouth-and-trouser set" line!

BTW 2 : You didn't mention "New Amsterdam", the odd song out, with its neo-folk stylings and passing reference to his two childhood homes. Or the excellent bonus tracks on the superior-quality-reissues, which include the slow version of "Clown Time Is Over", and his own versions of the songs he gave away to Dusty Springfield, Dave Edmunds and the Specials.

Eventually, I came to like this album quite a bit, but in liking it I also came to realize why exactly I had such an odd initial reaction to it. Each of the first four albums (and a good number of albums after this one) had a strong identity and a clear unifying stylistic theme within them, whereas this one is just a bunch of good songs that Costello and his band cobbled together into an album. Generally, I tend to find that my favorite albums either have a consistent sound and vibe, on the one hand, or they go strongly the other way, with a strong emphasis on stylistic diversity, on the other; Trust, in contrast, occupies a lukewarm middle ground, where the songs don't especially sound tied together by anything but where all of them are clearly songs the band did without stretching themselves too far. Again, I want to stress that I like (but rarely love) lots of albums that fall into this category, and I like this one just fine, but this combination + the fact that I Costello isn't somebody I instinctively gravitate towards, in retrospect, made such a perfect storm of indifference on my part somewhat inevitable.

Still, that was then, and this is now, and I like everything on here to varying degrees (though a good chunk of it is closer to "kinda like" than to "love"). The opening "Clubland" is rich and atmospheric, full of elements like lovely piano and Costello singing "They leave you half way to paradise / they leave you half way to bliss" over curious guitar sounds before culminating in a chorus that's awfully anthemic for having so few words. "Lovers' Walk" is a fascinating exercise of finding a new way to use Bo Diddley rhythms (especially in the piano), "You'll Never be a Man" is an impressive piano-based ballad featuring a surprising number of interesting melody snippets ... it would actually be really easy to go track by track here if I wanted, but at the same time I wouldn't be especially descriptive of any of them, so there's not much use. Of the remaining side one tracks, I'd say my favorites are "Strict Time" (another piano-heavy Bo Diddley-inflected song that ends up making me think of "South Bound Suarez" every time I hear it even though there's not that much resemblance) and "Watch Your Step," which doesn't really have a lot of there there other than the organ in the background, but manages to sound pretty and charming regardless.

Side two starts with four songs in a row of "Ehn, I like this I guess, sure why not" (I should note that "New Lace Sleeves" is often considered one of his best songs, but while I like some bits of it quite a bit I find it a little rambling), and while this isn't the worst fate in the world, it's a good thing that I'm a pretty big fan of the last three tracks. "Shot With His Own Gun" is a dark, sorta-vaudevillian piano ballad that's the most theatrical Elvis had let himself get to this point, and it's a total blast (I just love the piano chords behind each iteration of Elvis singing the title). "Fish 'n' Chip Paper" has a retro rock vibe in much the same way "Luxembourg" from side one does, but unlike "Luxembourg" (which is jumping out of its skin to associate itself with the typical retro-themed material of the debut), it manages to live comfortably in its (sorta) honky tonk shell without feeling like a genre exercise. And finally, the closing "Big Sister's Clothes" is an odd downer of a way to end the album, but I find this lends the album some personality at the end that it doesn't really have otherwise, and the juxtaposition of the out-of-place upbeat mid-section with the glum vibe of the rest makes the song very interesting to me.

Reading this review, I'm realizing that it doesn't really match up with the rating in terms of tone, but then again it starts and ends pretty strong, and the high points are pretty high, so I'm willing to stick with it (though it's borderline for sure). As strong as some of the material is, I'm glad that Costello didn't start churning out clones of this album; much of this feels like the band functioning on autopilot (which apparently, given how many drugs went into making this, isn't far from the truth), and the band could probably have kept on churning out albums just like this without too much additional effort. Still, while it's somewhat of a letdown from the string of punchy and impactful albums that kicked off his career, it's still rather nice, and somebody who only knows him from the first four albums probably would like this if they liked those.

MATTHEW CONSTANTINE (02/13/17)

I agree - even with no musical or lyrical concepts it's hard to overlook an album with "New Lace Sleeves", "Shot With His Own Gun" etc. But the bonus track edition is a more satisfying listening experience - it contains "Twenty Five to Twelve" (the ancestor of "Invisible Man"), his first stabs at "Seconds of Pleasure" and "Boy With A Problem", and a couple of jazz standards (which show that songs like "Almost Blue" were always going to happen)...and, indeed, an instrumental which suggests he's a better guitarist than we thought.

The biggest and most pleasant surprise for me in listening to this was how moving I found some of the ballads; Costello brings much of the same pathos to this material that he brought to some of the more notable material of his albums to this point. In particular, the two Gram Parsons covers ("I'm Your Toy," which is a cover of "Hot Burrito #1" from Gilded Palace of Sin, and the closing "How Much I've Lied") are an absolute delight, and if somebody didn't know these were covers I bet they would be regarded by them as among his better works of the early 80s. The album highlight, and a minor hit single in the UK, was "Good Year for the Roses" (originally by Jerry Chesnut), which becomes a masterwork of arrangement in the 'chorus' parts (especially that quiet little pattern that's played by guitar in one iteration and keyboard in another), and while I have no idea what the original sounds like, I'd have to imagine that this version is no worse than that one.

There are nine other songs, and I have no intention to discuss all of them, apart from saying that there's a good balance of fast and slow numbers throughout. The opening "Why Don't You Love Me Like You Used to Do" (Hank Williams) has a bit of a jittery vibe reminiscient of the band's 70s material, but for the most part the band manages to conceal its standard habits in the rest, while still managing to have a personality in the playing that makes it a cut above a standard C&W backing band. And you know what? That's good enough for me to consider this much more enjoyable than not, and it leads to me giving it a favorable rating. Unexpected cover albums in the middle of a band's ostensible prime years don't always turn out great (see: Pin Ups), but this one's a lot of fun, and I'm glad it exists. If you're a big EC fan who has been avoiding this one due to its less than favorable reputation, give it a shot with an open mind.

Steven Highams (rawdon.lilly.gmail.com) (07/13/2018)

'Good Year for the Roses' was actually a major UK hit, John. Top five, or pretty near that, in the autumn of '81, at the same time as Squeeze (one of my favourite bands then, when I was a teenager) did even better with their Costello-produced original, 'Labelled with Love'. Strange time really, with these 'New Wave' acts suddenly "going country". I remember him doing a TV documentary on the making of this album at the time. Might be on Youtube if you're interested in seeing it.

It is on Youtube - I've just checked; it was an edition of 'The South Bank Show', a now-defunct UK arts program that ran for many years.

I agree with this positive assessment ... for the most part. I'd have a hard time raising specific objections to much of the material on here, and the album has enough variety so that it never really has a chance to get boring ... and yet there's something stopping me from quite loving it as much as I do This Year's Model or even Armed Forces or Get Happy!!!. This increased sophistication in approach isn't a bad fit for Costello, but it isn't a perfect one either; I inevitably find myself thinking about the description in A Christmas Carol of Peter Cratchit proudly walking about the house in one of his father's collared shirts that is too big for him. This is a rare occasion where I find myself agreeing with a Robert Christgau review of a given album (in this case, he gave it a B+, which is about what I give it); paraphrasing, he says that much of the material takes approaches that don't necessarily fit, which leads him to dismiss it as pretentious. I, of course, am not inclined towards lines of thought that lead to "This is pretentious and therefore it's inferior," but I am inclined to agree with the thought that this album doesn't always work in the way it was intended to work. So much of it is wonderful in some sense, but so much of the material leaves me with a slight nagging "Yeah, but ..." feeling that holds it back for me.

Song by song, it's quite impressive nonetheless, and the album still merits a high grade. The album's centerpiece, "Man Out of Time," is almost too obvious a choice for best song, but I just can't persuade myself to make a case against it, so I'll go with my gut. It starts and ends with a screaming post-punk blast (taken from early sketches of the song during initial recording sessions), but the bulk of it is a big piano-heavy Springsteen-like (in a good way) anthem, and it does a great job of balancing its pomp with memorability and a rousing delivery. In the race for second best, there are a few decent choices: the opening "Beyond Belief" (featuring an arrangement that uses the sparse minimalism of the opening, built around just bass and drums, to create a sound that feels like it goes on forever and that really makes the other instruments pop whenever they come in), the quiet jazzy ballad "Amost Blue" (a huge departure for Elvis and one where he comes out a winner), "Little Savage" (an upbeat number that sounds like a more densely arranged version of something from Trust), "Pidgin English" (featuring a fascinating guitar sound in the beginning and a very adventurous vocal arrangement), and the closing "Town Cryer" (an emotional piano-heavy orchestrated ballad that lets the orchestration carry the sound during the coda).

Among the rest, I'm most interested in the French-inflected "The Long Honeymoon" (about a wife who has major trust issues with her new husband), the gentle piano-heavy "Kid About it," and the updated Baroque pop of "You Little Fool," but even if I'm not inclined to mention the rest of the album, I like it overall. It only made a slightly stronger impression on me on first listen than did Trust, but over time it grew on me considerably, and while I would never consider putting it close to a list of my very favorite albums, I nonetheless would recommend it quite warmly. I'm not entirely surprised that Costello moved on from this album's approach almost immediately, but I'm glad he dabbled in it once.

MATTHEW CONSTANTINE (02/13/17)

I think Geoff Emerick may have acted as a catalyst for, if not a direct influence on, the improved musical arrangements. Nieve is never a problem here - in fact he finds his metier as an orchestral arranger on this album.

Random thoughts: Can you believe that "Beyond Belief" was even wordier and even faster in its first draft? "Shabby Doll" is slightly marred by the recycling of the "joking/unspoken" rhyme from an earlier song. I always read "Man Out Of Time" as a song about a pair of conspiring / philandering politicians being pursued by a hitman - one possibly hired by their wives. In which case the screaming sections represent the man being caught and stabbed to death by his pursuer...Or could I be mistaken?

The bonus-track editions are inconsistent but inevitably worth finding - a couple of non-album a-sides, some unexpected cover versions, a song he wrote for Frida from Abba (she turned it down) and the album's lost title track. (That song's hook: it's meant to be a naughty pun isn't it: "an intimate `bone'-soir" ?!)

Because I'm not especially creative, my two favorite songs on here were also the two biggest hits. "Every Day I Write the Book" is a sorta New Wave, sorta Soul number propelled forward by a fascinating keyboard part tucked underneath the verses, and even if somebody doesn't especially like Elvis Costello, I don't know how they'd dislike something this memorable and fun and interesting. The other highlight is "Shipbuilding," which Langer had originally written for Robert Wyatt (the former Soft Machine founder who had established a moderately successful solo career), and where Costello ultimately added his own lyrics about the Falklands War and how the war had revived the British shipbuilding industry but potentially at the cost of the lives of the sons of the shipbuilders. The song is a very moving piano-based ballad with a great trumpet part integrated within it, and its unsettling ending fits in perfectly with the unsettling nature of the rest of the song.

The album has plenty of worthwhile nuggets aside from those two songs, though. The opening "Let Them All Talk" is a little startling, courtesy of the descending horn riffs that kick it off and recur throughout, but it's a great opener, building into an amusing chorus (with some female backing vocals that don't totally fit but don't hurt things too much either) and taking unexpected paths to get there. Of the other songs on the first side, "Love Went Mad" seems a little underwritten, but both "The Greatest Thing" (with a fun drum part!) and "The Element Within Her" (very charming, especially with the "la la la" opening vocals) are about as good as I can imagine from a lightweight version of early 80s Costello.

The second side doesn't have any major highlights (though I suppose "Pills and Soap" comes close in a way), but I genuinely like all seven songs here to some degree or another. "TKO (Boxing Day)" has a strut courtesy of the horns and the keyboards that I find quite entertaining; "Charm School" intertwines an off-kilter bassline with the (very 80s) keyboards (is that a synclavier?) in an effective manner; "The Invisible Man" and "Mouth Almighty" both amplify their keyboard parts in a way that makes them seem quite lively ("The Invisible Man" also features the horns in an entertaining way); "King of Thieves" has a great, simple but nervous piano part that interacts with the other aspects in a way I like a lot; "Pills and Soap" is a totally bonkers pseudo-rapped railing against (as best I can tell) mindless nationalism, with a great piano part intertwined well with the percussion and the other keyboards; and finally, "The World and his Wife" is a delightful happy anthem full of uplifting horns and caustic lyrics. Again, most of this side doesn't really jump out at me in terms of individual tracks, but the second half of this album always leaves me in a terribly good mood when I'm done with it, and that has to count for something.

No, this probably isn't the ideal form for an Elvis Costello album to take, and it's not especially shocking that the change in direction this album represents ended up dragging down him and his band so badly on the next album. Nonetheless, it's a really fun listen (I actually liked it more than Imperial Bedroom for the first three listens of each), and if you think that you've started down the path of Elvis Costello fandom, you should almost certainly get this one. I suppose you could just look for "Every Day I Write the Book" and "Shipbuilding" on a compilation or listen to them individually, but you'd miss out on a lot of fun minor gems if you did that.

MATTHEW CONSTANTINE (02/13/17)

Had he found a new gimmick, inspired by Dexys/Madness? Three key tracks (it seems to me) are "The World And His Wife","Invisible Man" and "TKO" - all of which follow the formula of serious subjects hidden behind superficially "funny" exteriors (surely the I.M horn riff would make Jack Dee grin from ear to ear!)

I've always thought "Love Went Mad" was rather underrated - it may be one of his "orphanages for imagery" but the word associations are giggle inducing and there's the hint that he's trying to say something about the sex lives of policemen / church ministers...

And yet again, the deluxe reissues have some significant material: "Town Where Time Stood Still", "Heathen Town", and not forgetting his demo of "Shatterproof" which I far prefer to the Billy Bremner version.

The lowest point of the album, and the worst Costello track to this point, is a cover of the Farnell Jenkins R&B song "I Wanna be Loved" (kicking off side two), which sounds like it could have fit in seamlessly on David Bowie's Tonight album (Costello's vocals end up sounding uncannily like Bowie's in much of it), and that's about as far from a compliment as I can possibly get. While nothing before it is quite as bad, not much in that stretch is especially good either; the opening "The Only Flame in Town," for instance, featuring some vocals from Daryl Hall, is about as tacky as mid-80s music can get, thanks to the terrible choices in keyboards and the poor way in which the saxophone is incorporated. Of the other tracks on side one, "Home Truth" is probably the best, featuring some gnarly harmonic choices in the vocals against the backdrop of the icky keyboards, and I guess I kinda like "Room with No Number" and its goofy "spooky" synth pattern laid on top of an otherwise fairly conventional Costello song, but the other songs on this side completely pass me by every time.

The second side, apart from the disaster of the opener, is a marked improvement, even if the production is still an inescapable problem. In particular, "The Comedians" (a gentle shuffling ballad), "Sour Milk-Cow Blues" (a fun bluesy boogie rocker inexplicably drowned in every 1984 production gimmick that Langer and Winstanley could find) and especially "Peace in Our Time" (a very thought provoking protest-oriented song that probably should have just been an acoustic number but still works in the more fleshed out form that it takes here) are perfectly solid songs that would have been nice inclusions to any Costello album but that absolutely stand out here. I also somewhat enjoy the up-tempo post-punk aggression of "The Deportees Club," even if it's nearly ruined by throwing in saxophones and harpsichord that absolutely do not belong.

This isn't quite a disaster, but it's not a good album either, and pretty much the only people who need to bother with this are people who like Costello so much that they want to hear every nook and cranny of his output. The Attractions did indeed break up after this album (they would reform eventually), and it's just as well, because this approach was a total dead end.

MATTHEW CONSTANTINE (02/13/17)

A really underrated album. Over-produced / over-arranged in typical '80s style, yes, but the songs cut through nonetheless. First of all: "Room Without A Number" [who's the narrator and what is his relationship to the eloping/philandering couple?], "Joe Porterhouse" [is he dead, or has he killed someone else and gone on the run?], "Sour Milk Cow Blues" and "Inch By Inch" - these are all merely `archetypal EC' but that is only to say they resemble the best Trust outtakes you've never heard! Secondly: a really underrated song is "Worthless Thing" - lyrically it's a funnier dry-run for something on the next album, but musically it's the next step in the development of his artful-jazz-lounge-pop side.

Many writers who didn't like this album at first have enthused over the bonus-track editions. And no wonder. There are acoustic / in-progress versions of the songs, unmediated by Langer-Winstanley. Cover versions (Richard Thompson, Jerry Chesnut...yes, we're getting the drift). The first stab at "I Hope You're Happy Now". And even the ancestor of "Tramp The Dirt Down" (a song which EC said was terrible - I beg to differ)

The easiest tracks to dismiss are the ones that wear their bluesy or country-ish influences on their sleeves, but while a stripped down version of the album probably would have ditched these tracks first, I manage to find them quite entertaining on their own and in context. The covers of "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" (which admittedly won't make anybody forget the version by The Animals) and "Eisenhower Blues" (originally by J.B. Lenoir) don't at all fit in with the typical image of Costello, and somebody who reflexively dislikes anything bluesy (which, come to think of it, would probably include a lot of people who were still fans of Elvis Costello in 1986) will probably hate these, but they're so self-assured and fun that I can't get myself to dislike them. Similarly, the hyper country of "Glitter Gulch" and "The Big Light" are probably among the least likely tracks to get shouted out as requests by audience members during a given Elvis Costello concert, but they provide energetic bursts at spots on the album that pretty badly need energetic bursts, and for that they earn their keep.

The rest of the album fits pretty cleanly into what one would likely expect from a Costello album with a focus on a stripped down, more acoustic-based sound. The slower, gentler material is generally extremely effective; "Poisoned Rose" drags a little bit without doing too much to keep my interest, but pretty much everything else in this category is a winner. Without naming every worthwhile track (there's quite a few of them), I'll mention a handful that especially stand out to me. The opening "Brilliant Mistake" immediately wipes away all of the remaining bad taste in my mouth from Goodbye Cruel World, with a gentle acoustic melody accentuated by a loud drum part and a delightful piano accordion tossed in here and there (and featuring the hilarious line, "She said that she was working for the ABC News / It was as much of the alphabet as she knew how to use"). "Our Little Angel" starts as a downbeat number with dreamy echoey guitar texture dripped on top before switching into a more explicitly country mode (then switching back and forth), and the contrast between the two approaches makes each section seem that much stronger. "Indoor Fireworks" is a great ballad telling the story of a relationship that failed because there was a little too much tension between the two (which sometimes led to some passionate moments but ultimately doomed them). "Little Palaces" combines a very tense acoustic guitar pattern with bits of mandolin, and Costello's vocal delivery is full of drama and pathos that is matched well by the music.

My favorite on the album (I think) is "American Without Tears," a swaying 3/4 anthem that's about something related to relations between people from Britain and America (that's as deep as I'm going to try and guess with these lyrics; there might be some deeply encoded meaning in these lyrics, but I suspect that these lyrics are more about providing an impression of meaning than an explicit meaning, and that's perfectly ok by me), with a French accordion popping in after each iteration of the memorable chorus. And finally, the last two tracks are a total hoot and couldn't be more different from each other; "Suit of Lights" is bright and cheerful (largely thanks to Nieve back on piano) and has the hilarious line "It's the force of habit / if it moves then you fuck it / if it doesn't move you stab it," while the closing "Sleep of the Just" is melancholy and thought-provoking and oh-so-atmospheric while also having its fair share of memorability.

No, this isn't quite a great album, but it's an impressive one, not only as a standalone work but as a symbol of Costello's self-awareness, which allowed him to avert a further descent into the gaping maw of the mainstream 80s right at a point, in 1986, when he theoretically should have been most vulnerable to one (then again, couldn't one argue that he got his 1986 album out of the way in 1984?). Maybe Costello as Dylan (which isn't entirely fair or accurate, but nonetheless has enough truth in it to make a broad summary of this album in those terms not completely out of line) doesn't quite have the artistic ceiling of some of Costello's other approaches, but it also has a very high artistic floor, and Costello manages to clear that floor and then some here. Every Costello fan should own this, and I can easily see a situation where a non-fan might enjoy this a lot as well.

MATTHEW CONSTANTINE (02/13/17)

Actually "Glitter Gulch" has always been a highly popular song amongst the EC cult - as much because of its anti-capitalism society-as-television-game-show theme as its country/rockabilly stylings.

"Sleep Of The Just" has been the subject of a lot of debate - but EC has explained it as a song about a soldier whose sister is a Page Three-type pin-up model, with different stanzas sung from each sibling's mperspective. Which rules out some of the more melodramatic interpretations [he'd get around to writing a "military rape" song a few years later].

"Poisoned Rose" surely is one of his better vocals.

"Little Palaces" has always been a personal favorite, for the music as much as the lyrics PS: If you think a 57 minute album is - for the vinyl age - excessively lengthy, might I remind you of Todd Rundgren's "Initiation" ?

The first half is just marvelous. The opening "Uncomplicated" is (mostly) a two-chord (in the guitars; the keyboards throw in a simple rising sequence of chords to counter the rest) churning rocker that shows some fascinating choices in the sounds that accentuate the main guitar part and in how the different instruments layer on top of another, and just as on King of America, I like how Costello establishes a clear identity for the album as something completely different from its predecessor. "I Hope You're Happy Now" (with guitar and organ each amped up pretty loudly) and "Tokyo Storm Warning" (centered around a clever rhythm seemingly played a thousand times) are each loud and aggressive and chock-full of venom in the lyrics, and I could listen to either of them ten times in a row without getting tired of them. "Home is Anywhere You Hang Your Head" kinda sounds in spots like Costello doing an 80s update of something from Highway 61 Revisited, but he clearly puts his own personality on it in the rest, and the culmination of each iteration of the vocal melody in the singing of the title sounds incredibly satisfying every time. The extended instrumental coda, centered around loud rhythm guitar and gentle keyboard parts, is a nice touch as well. And finally, "I Want You" is a masterpiece of tension through repetition; after about a minute of gentle acoustic balladry, the song shifts into obsessively cycling through the same uncomfortable musical phrases over and over, while Elvis sings uncomfortably obsessive lyrics about lust and anger (the lyrics about suffering through his partner's infidelity), and the slow decay of the music into nothingness in the last minute is absolutely spectacular and harrowing. A list of top ten Costello songs that doesn't include this one is probably a list that needs re-examining.

The second half starts off pretty strong as well; "Honey, Are You Straight or Are You Blind?" is a memorable throwback to when Elvis focused on simplistic and catchy pop-rockers, "Blue Chair" is a rousing mid-tempo anthem that has one of the album's few betrayals that it's from 1986 (the chiming keyboard sounds), and "Battered Old Bird" is a gospel-tinged piano-heavy number that features one of Costello's very best vocal performances. "Crimes of Paris" and "Poor Napoleon" are somewhat of a step down, though; neither of them are bad, but in comparison to the overall superlative material of the rest of the album, they just feel strikingly average ("Crimes of Paris" is an average Costello up-tempo acoustic-centered number, and "Poor Napoleon" is an average Costello big-sounding pompous anthem), and they can't help but feel like a letdown. At least the album ends on a good note; "Next Time Around" has a big bouncy fun riff in its chorus, and overall it's a jovial and memorable way to close things out.

Blood and Chocolate is not quite a masterpiece, but it's a top-notch post-punk album all the same, and it's very heartening to know for sure that the band's decline earlier in the decade had been mostly due to external factors and not from a fundamental loss of talent. At the very least, EVERYONE should hear "I Want You," and if you're looking to build a Costello collection beyond the first few, this is probably the place to start.

MATTHEW CONSTANTINE (02/13/17)

There are several schools of thought about "I Want You". Is the cuckolded narrator consciously turning into a psychotic stalker-type as the song progresses? Is there some hint in the ninety seconds that he's abducted and assaulted her? Or is he just talking to himself, and - at the end - pleading for some kind of escape from his obsession, and thereby increasing the likelihood of his escaping?

Interesting that the next song puts the boot on the other foot. "Honey Are You Straight" is a clever number - there can't be that many songs in which the guy says to the jealous woman "you're posing as paranoid-jealous, imagining me with this other woman, because you're the one who wants to get it on with her"

"Battered Old Bird" - one of my favorites, mainly for the lyrical detail, the autobiography, and the fact that I'm not sure who the battered old bird is: the alcoholic writer, the child-murderer, the father or someone else entirely?

At the time of writing, I've never heard the Velvets-inspired "feedback version" of "Poor Napoleon", but I imagine it was more effective. The standard-issue version seems like a case of wrong music for the right lyric: this is another song where there's ambiguity as to whether a murder takes place [see also Watching The Detectives / Man Out of Time].

It helps that the album gets off to a really strong start. The opening "...This Town..." starts with a really bizarre sonic pattern (I want to guess that's a guitar but I wouldn't be surprised if it was a keyboard) before going into a really caustic big pounding pop anthem with hilarious moments like "Everybody in this town THINKS YOU'RE A BASTARD," and the combination of the catchiness and the venom shows that, even with the shiny production, Elvis is still the same as ever. "Let Him Dangle" is a dark angry jazzy number that focuses on the execution of Derek Bentley (somebody executed in Britain in the 1950s for killing a cop, and whose death became a focal point for death penalty opponents for the next few decades), and for all of the strong moments in the song, the way that Costello's angry singing of the title musically conjures up the image of a swinging corpse is the most impressive. "Deep Dark Truthful Mirror" is another jazzy number, this time a happy one (with a strong New Orleans lilt to it) centered around piano and with an enthusiastic horn section, and it's a total blast. And "Veronica," co-written with Paul McCartney, well, that's just a perfect up-tempo pop song, both in the relatively low-key verse melody and the grander "secondary" melody (which is sorta the chorus but sorta not), and the various production effects, such as distorting the vocals at just the right times, or changing the volume in ways that aren't completely obvious, lift the song up to levels that it might not have reached with a simpler approach.

Beyond this point, I more or less like everything, but as mentioned, much of it doesn't go far beyond what I would consider as just "nice." "Tramp the Dirt Down" is notable for its sheer rage towards Margaret Thatcher, presented in the form of a calm acoustic ballad with Celtic elements, and "Stalin Malone" is an amusingly out of place horn-dominated jazzy instrumental, and "Any King's Shilling" is another lovely excursion into the world of Celtic music, but otherwise there's a lot of material on here that can't help but strike me as veering towards the most excessive aspects of Costello as a songwriter and performer. Mind you, I find these excessive aspects pretty enjoyable, but I also find myself refusing to embrace them, and so songs like "Chewing Gum" or "Satellite" or "Pads, Paws and Claws" (another collaboration with McCartney), as much as I wouldn't mind hearing them every couple of years, are also ones that I can't anticipate ever going out of my way to listen to.

Still, for as much material here leaves me a little cold, I nonetheless find that the album works better in aggregate than as the sum of its constituent parts, and many factors that weaken the impact of individual tracks nonetheless seem to strengthen the album slightly as a whole. Casual fans can skip this one (even if they should still find a way to hear "Let Him Dangle" or "Veronica" or "Tramp the Dirt Down"), but if you've swooped up all of the "obvious" picks from Costello, this is a decent next stop.

MATTHEW CONSTANTINE (02/13/17)

I always thought "Deep Dark Truthful Mirror" started life as a Van Morrison pastiche - it has more than a few of those stereotypically Vanny descending vocal phrases, and the horn chart fits the bill too. Oddly, though I never cared much for Mr M, I like this song a lot. Partly for the sheer weirdness of the lyrics - EC says it's about "alcoholic self-deception" but I wonder if even he can explain some of the images?

"Veronica" is a classic - melodically, instantly charming but...then you start to figure out its meaning. I may be wrong but, because of the first verses, I'm sure the narrator is the lost love of sixty-five years before. Near the end of their lives, these lovers-that-never-quite-were have been reunited in a care home (one that doesn't care for its residents terribly well), But alas she's sinking into senility, and she doesn't recognise the man talking to her - well, of course not, she's even forgot her own name.

A version of "Stalin Malone" with the lyrics intact has been released on the Deluxe reissue of "Spike" - its certainly interesting to hear, even though you can see why he dropped the lyrics: they're too much of a mouthful, even for him.

"Tramp The Dirt Down" - many have noted the irony of its melodic resemblance to "Isn't She Lovely".

Too few have commented on what a great vocal it is - "tears of rage" indeed.

Surprised you didn't mention the splendidly weird "Miss Macbeth" - or the simply gorgeous "Any King's Shilling" (which, incidentally, is based on a real incident in the life of EC's grandfather).

Among the better material, the peak is probably the opening "The Other Side of Summer," an attempt at making something along the lines of early 70s Beach Boys (Costello once named Holland his favorite Beach Boys album so this isn't as shocking as it might sound). It's a good attempt, with a nice chorus and decent vocal harmonies (and an amusing moment of throwing shade at John Lennon), but as many before me have observed, it probably could have been better with a more vibrant approach to the production. "How to be Dumb" is an amusingly bombastic and malicious anthem that comes within a stone's throw of "Like a Rolling Stone" in the chorus but just avoids direct plagiarism, "All Grown Up" is an orchestrated piano-ballad with Elvis making his vocals sound extra weary for effect, "Harpies Bizarre" overcomes its odd synth line to become a decent piece of imitation Baroque pop, "After the Fall" is a decent dark acoustic ballad, "Georgie And Her Rival" is an up-beat pop song in the vein of "Veronica," and the closing "Couldn't Call it Unexpected No. 4," even if I have no idea what mood it's trying to convey, is still memorable and oddly moving.

The other six tracks (five if we don't count the 22 second interlude in the middle), though, just don't do much for me at all. The two collaborations with Paul McCartney ("So Like Candy," "Playboy to a Man") are total throwaways, the seemingly endless "Hurry Down Doomsday (The Bugs Are Taking Over)" is Costello at his worst (chaos + vocals that sound like a screaming version of 80s Dylan), "Broken" is a weirdly New-Age piece written by his wife (Cait O'Riordan, formerly of The Pogues), and "Sweet Pear" has never made any impression on me whatsoever. Each of these, again, is something that I thought at some point I would find myself enjoying, but aside from some mild beauty in "Broken," I find little to recommend in these.

What I find most fascinating about this album, honestly, comes from the fact that, even after several listens, I still find myself with the nagging feeling that, with just one more listen, maybe I'll come to like all of this material more and find myself wanting to give it the higher grade I initially thought I'd give it. And yet, I know that I had that thought the last time I listened to this, and ... nope. Don't bother unless you're hardcore.

MATTHEW CONSTANTINE (04/13/17)

I for one have never understood the complaints about cluttered arrangements and production. And I've been a fan of this album since age 15 (by which time I was roughly 12 years into a life of music obssessiveness). What are the McFerrins of this world hearing that I'm not? I know what you're not hearing - the greatness of so many of these songs.

"All Grown Up": while Costello later regretted his vocal performance on this song, it's worth noting that he later was surprised at the "compassion" he heard within Tasmin Archer's rendition of the song...until he remembered that she'd never had the misfortune to know the person who inspired it!

"Georgie..." I thought was one of the lesser tracks because it borrows a little from "Oliver's Army" as well as "Veronica". I'm surprised you didn't much care for "So Like Candy" - besides its melodic/harmonic coolness, there's a story behind it. McCartney (clearly the "lead writer" in both this album's Mac+Mac songs) conceived of it as a song about unrequited love for a "glamorous model-y kind of girl" but Elvis added details relating to his on-off relationship with Bebe Buell Even more surprised you didn't even mention "Invasion Hit Parade", which may or may not conflate the iniquities of the payola-riddled music biz with American foreign policies, with appropriately grand music (sounds like it could've begun as a prog-rock epic but was distilled down to its main themes). And, you guessed it, I like "Doomsday..." as well (interesting to hear the solo, one-man-and-his-tape-loops, version EC later played live).

The main, vocal, iteration of "Couldn't Call It..." derives from the GBH score. (Is the same true of the instrumental snippet? Unsure). I've never been sure: is the last line a "double-negative" or just a head-in-hands "negative"?

In this regard, Costello probably bit off more than he could chew with this project. This is a collaboration with the Brodsky Quartet (a well-renowned string quartet that has made plenty of recordings of the greatest string quartets ever written), and the material consists of songs inspired by the idea of letters written to Juliet (as in Romeo and Juliet) over string quartet backing. It doesn't especially work as pop music, and it definitely doesn't work as classical music (the Brodsky Quartet performs the material with aplomb but he doesn't exactly give them a tremendous amount to work with), but it's weirdly interesting and moderately entertaining all the same. If I had to pick highlights, I would probably pick from "I Almost Had a Weakness" (up-tempo and fun), "Taking My Life in Your Hands" (pleading and passionate), "Jacksons, Monk and Rowe" (could have easily been rearranged into a more conventional Costello song), and especially "Damnation's Cellar" (bouncy and vaudevillian), all of which could plausibly contend to land in a top 100 list of best Costello songs. There's nothing especially wrong with the rest, but it tends to be dirgey or otherwise moderately boring in a way that's fairly predictable for an artistic exercise of this sort. That the album lasts over an hour doesn't especially help either.

Still, while I wouldn't even remotely consider this one of Costello's better albums, it's not a terrible one either. I can easily see a circumstance where this could have been tremendous fun to listen to in live performance (I don't know if Costello ever did this, but other people have adapted this to the stage), especially if there had been some commentary from the stage before some of the pieces (which would break up the monotony). If you're interested in listening to one of Costello's off-the-beaten-path albums, you could do much worse than to listen to this one.

MATTHEW CONSTANTINE (04/13/17)

I think you've overlooked an important point. The music and the lyrics (!) were organically written by all five participants! Three of its better-known songs are almost entirely free from Costello input, on the composing side. (Namely: "Jacksons Monk And Rowe", the single, and "Who Do You Think You Are" and "Why", both covered by Bjork). You may not be surprised that this is one of my very favorite EC albums. How you can overlook the likes of "For Other Eyes", the uproarious "This Offer Is Unrepeatable", and the entire "I Thought I'd Write" / "Last Post" / "The First To Leave" sequence?

And, it's true that "I Almost Had A Weakness" borrows a little of the Merrie Melodies cartoon theme...but is that so incongrous? The current Prince of Wales allegedly heard the song and pissed himself laughing, recognising similar characters in his own extended family.

The album starts quite strong, and there are clearly above average tracks scattered throughout, so it's not as if it has a serious pacing problem or anything like that. The opening "Pony St." is a noisy anthemic guitar rocker with some beautiful piano in the beginning, and the combination of the rhythm section and the keyboards definitely gives a feeling of being home that's quite satisfying. "Kinder Murder" is another effective guitar-heavy rocker, evoking elements of both the old (there's a glammy punk retro feel to it partially from the the main vocal hook evoking the downward guitar riff from "Rebel Rebel") and the new (it definitely feels like a song that came out during the early 90s after grunge and alternative had started to become a thing), and it could have been arranged into an effective number during any era of Costello's career. "13 Steps Lead Down" is yet another strong number (though its best part is its menacing acoustic introduction), full of noisy guitar power and bits of retro organ colliding against the rhythm section, and once this song is over it seems like the album might be on course to become a major highlight in Costello's career. And yet, after this, there are only a few songs that make me feel enthusiastic, and the rest just moderately entertains me without leaving any significant emotional residue. I'm a big fan of "London's Brilliant Parade," a gentle shuffle (with oddly mixed guitar and piano that is somehow more intriguing for how odd the mix sounds) that culminates in a fantastic rising falsetto hook when Costello sings the song's title, and I guess I really like the sorta jazzy piano balladry of "You Tripped At Every Step," but beyond that, I have to think a bit about what parts I consider standouts. "20% Amnesia" is a fun angry rocker I suppose, and "All the Rage" is a nice bit of organ/acoustic guitar anthemic balladry I suppose, and the closing "Favourite Hour" is a nice bit of quiet piano balladry I suppose, but that's about as far as my feelings go. The rest is tracks that I'll hear every couple of years, enjoy when I hear them, and forget about them almost immediately.

Still, there are worse listening fates. This album doesn't deserve its baffling inclusion in 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, but it also doesn't deserve any especially harsh criticism either. If you like Costello, you'll probably like this album, and if you don't like Costello, you might still like this album.

MATTHEW CONSTANTINE (04/13/17)

"Kinder Murder" - so here's the "actual" military-rape song (further to my remarks re: King Of America). More interestingly: it seems a rite of passage for lapsed Catholics to write a song like this one, in which they argue with themselves about The Abortion Issue. (See also: Lydon, J., O'Sullivan, G., Hewson, P.). In EC's case the internal debate even manifests itself in the title - which has opposing meanings, whether you interpret the first word as German or English!

Other comments: "Too Soon To Know" - bit of a pre-Beatles-'60s-style ballad, so is the Orbisonesque title a coincidence? "Rocking Horse Road" (an Australian location, I think) proved to be an effective jamming vehicle onstage, but the reprise of the phrase "something / somewhere quite like it" is a minor nuisance. "Favorite Hour" - nice harmonic ambiguities, and is it a song about a death row prisoner? Jury's still out.

Still, it's an amusing throwaway, and repeated listens have made me feel a little better about. There's a great Dylan cover ("I Threw It All Away," from Nashville Skyline) and an even greater Kinks cover ("Days," a non-album single from the late 60s, done in a psychedelic manner totally unlike the original but enjoyable for it), and the rest is mostly harmless 50's-style rock or crooning of some sort or another. He gives great readings to "The Very Thought of You" (an old pop standard) and "Please Stay" (a Burt Bacharach song from the 60s, made famous by The Drifters), and I have a good time with the up-tempo 50s guitar rock of "Leave My Kitten Alone," the over-the-top rich sappy piano balladry of "I've Been Wrong Before," and the country-ish balladry of "Must You Throw Dirt in My Face" (which would have fit in perfectly on Almost Blue). Sadly, the rest of the album doesn't do much for me, and there's a lot of it to not do much for me, which is a problem. The world just didn't need Elvis Costello covering Little Richard ("Bama Lama Bama Loo") in 1995, among other things.

In short, I can't get myself to say I actively dislike this album, but this album doesn't do much to break the sense that Costello spent the first half of the 90s totally half-assing his career. Seek out the tracks I mentioned above, but otherwise, don't bother.

Among the tracks that Costello had previously written for somebody else, I find myself absolutely smitten by "You Bowed Down," which Costello had contributed to a Roger McGuinn (formerly of The Byrds) solo album in early 1991. There is admittedly a quiet voice in my head that tells me I shouldn't give so much credit to a song that apes the classic early Byrds style so perfectly; the main guitar line practically sounds like what you'd get if you loaded the entirety of Mr. Tambourine Man and Turn! Turn! Turn! into a computer and asked it to come up with a new guitar line that summarizes the entirety of those albums. And yet, this is a situation where the self-confidence and self-assuredness in the delivery of that guitar line practically knocks me over when I hear it, and the sheer joy I feel from listening to it drowns out that annoying pip-squeak that tells me not to like it so much. The song goes beyond just the main guitar line, however, blending aspects of '66-'67 Byrds with Costello's own personality, and in the end I can't help loving it.

Among the material that hadn't been recorded previously, there are plenty of good songs, yet the one that I keep returning to over and over is "Distorted Angel." It's definitely a song that Costello couldn't have written before the mid-90s, as neither the odd synth line nor the subtle dance rhythms underpinning it would have been part of his musical vocabulary before then, but I'm glad Costello stuck around long enough to have a chance to record something like this. It's very low-key, blending very tasteful Nieve keyboard work with jazzy rhythm section work (the recurring bassline is a total winner), and everything in it works, including the bits of falsetto.

The bulk of the album is roughly split between quiet tracks of various sorts and energetic tracks of various sorts, and on balance, the ballads come out ahead. "The Other End of the Telescope" (originally written for Aimee Mann), which opens the album, builds from quiet ballad to slightly louder anthem, and the chorus, reached after a long period of teasing, is pretty great. "Little Atoms" is a little more energetic, built around a burbling synth line before it centers around a simple guitar line, but it's still rather low-key and restrained, and I enjoy it plenty. The title track is a little too self-conscious in its position as the album's big stately anthem, but it's still lovely, full of a great mix of piano and quiet organ. A couple of other ballads aren't especially great, but they're fine ("Why Can't a Man Stand Alone?" sounds a bit like a Get Happy!! leftover, which isn't the best thing ever but isn't the worst thing ever, while "Poor Fractured Atlas" doesn't do as much as it could do with its Beethoven-inspired underpinning but is still pretty), and the closing "I Want to Vanish" continues the Costello tendency to cap off his albums with quiet ballads that aren't great but that sound 15-20% better simply because they're at the end. All in all, this is pretty strong album for quiet Costello tracks.

Aside from "You Bowed Down," the track record is a little more mixed for the energetic tracks. "Complicated Shadows" was originally supposed to be a Johnny Cash track, and it's a good enough energetic growly guitar-rocker, but I wouldn't look down on a Costello fan who disliked it. "Shallow Grave" is a noisy jazzy mass of instruments booming and clanging and crashing, and while I like it, I feel like it would have worked significantly better as a Tom Waits song. And finally, "Starting to Come to Me" is an amusing upbeat zydeco-based pop song, but as fun as it is in the moment, it's still kind of a throwaway.

All told, this is a pretty decent album for a project that easily could have resulted in a throwaway (it's amusing to me that I felt it necessary to say at least something about every track, which is hardly an automatic given in my meanderings through the Costello catalogue). As mentioned, Costello would never work with The Attractions again (he'd work with Nieve and Pete Thomas again, but he'd never again work with Bruce Thomas, which suited Bruce just fine), and while this isn't as strong of an ending statement as, say, Blood & Chocolate would have been, it's still a perfectly fine capstone to a great long-term collaboration. This gets the same grade as Brutal Youth, but make no mistake, I like this one more.

MATTHEW CONSTANTINE (04/13/17)

The deluxe edition of this album is very much worth finding. It includes EC's own versions of the two songs he wrote with McCartney for the latter's Off The Ground album. It also rescues non-album classics like "Almost-Ideal Eyes" and "The Bridge I Burned". And there are few songs from his scratch-my-vack-type-project which played out over a series of singles: he covers some songs by other acts, on his b-sides, if they cover his songs, on their b-sides. Elvis sings Sleeper and Tricky? Works for me!

"Poor Fractured Atlas" isn't the only classical adaptation here. "Little Atoms" is based on the (Haydn-penned) German national anthem, as EC was quick to admit. He's also admitted that the substance of the song (infidelity + writer's block + "self-disgust" alternating "self-aggrandisement") got a bit lost as he tried to cram "flowers" and "virtues" into the lyric. "Complicated Shadows" started as a rockabilly song (I prefer it that way: just because it's more Cash-y). "Shallow Grave", chronologically the final McCartney song to emerge (we'll forget "25 Fingers", shall we?)

The title track: it's worth comparing Lush's version, which is less "anthemic" in its tempo and vocal delivery - another critic says that while Elvis sounds like someone who frequents art-galleries, Miki Berenyi (about sixteen years his junior) sounds more like an impatient teenager on a school trip, anxious to get out of the art gallery as soon as possible.

In broad strokes, this is a 100% Bacharach album (with Costello taking lead vocals), full of stylistic and arrangement approaches that quickly evoke the sorts of things that made Bacharach famous back in his hey-day. What makes this so remarkable, and where Costello clearly had a heavy influence, is that the album, for sounding so strongly a product of Bacharach, generally avoids the sort of overly sentimental schmaltz or eye-rolling cutesiness that one would absolutely expect of a Bacharach album from this late of a date. There are some stretches, yes, where these excesses inevitably make their way in, but I find it fairly shocking how few of them I hear. For an album built on big arrangements, it's also surprisingly subtle and emotionally restrained, and it's in these details that I hear the impact of Costello throughout.

The origin of this album came from the closing "God Give Me Strength," a song the two put together for the soundtrack to a 1995 movie called "Grace of My Heart," and it's so good that I can easily understand why they wanted to work together some more after that. The great opening horn line (which recurs throughout) moves into a low-key (relatively speaking) piano-heavy ballad (with some nice Elvis falsetto when he sings the chorus) that eventually becomes a giant emotional tour-de-force, and when he sings "I might as well/wipe her from my memory/fracture the spell/as she becomes my enemy" it's a genuinely moving moment. While it's my favorite of the album, though, it's not by a tremendous amount, and it's because the album has so many songs that I like about 90% as much as this one that I can give it a pretty high grade. The first three, for instance, get the album off to a great start; "In the Darkest Place" goes from low-key to BIG in about the blink of an eye but doesn't sound forced in its emotions at all, "Toledo" is a pleasant relationship-troubles song with a fascinating musing on the connections between people in Toledo, OH and Toledo, Spain, and "I Still Have That Other Girl," slightly awkward key change in the middle notwithstanding, benefits from the repeated amazing section starting from "But I just ..." and lasting through "I still have that other girl in my head" (a later variation has slightly different lyrics).

Other highlights include "The Long Division" (which is the one song here that I could easily have envisioned on a Costello solo album without any Bacharach involvement), the title track (a lovely sentimental ballad with a good mix of guitar, piano and orchestra), and "What's Her Name Today?" (another big emotional ballad that finds a way to keep the exact nature of the emotion at arm's length). Regarding the rest, I don't especially love them, but I also don't consider any of them duds; even the ones I consider the weakest ("Tears at the Birthday Party," which comes closest to matching the conception of this album I had before I listened to it, and "Such Unlikely Lovers," which has a swaggering horn riff that seems kinda silly in the context of the rest of the song) don't make me want to skip over them.

I considered giving this the same grade as I did Brutal Youth and All This Useless Beauty, but ultimately I had to round up; for an album conceived in these circumstances to turn out so enjoyable and so consistently tasteful makes me respect the effort tremendously, and ultimately this grade just seems right. Bacharach and Costello would, sadly, never work together again, but I'm glad their paths crossed the one time they did.

PS: A year later, the jazz great Bill Frisell put together an album called The Sweetest Punch (named after a song here that I didn't mention), which consists largely of jazz covers of the material from here (with Costello vocals on a couple of tracks). I have not yet heard it but I admit that I'm intrigued, especially since I've enjoyed the other Frisell I've listened to.

The best track on here is also the longest, the 7-minute "When I Was Cruel No. 2," a tense dirge built around hypnotic work from the rhythm section, a great mix of acoustic and piercing electric guitar, tasteful keyboard work, and a repeated sample of the word "Un" from the song "Un bacio è troppo poco" by an old Italian pop singer who went by the name Mina. On first listen, I felt ambiguous towards it (Did it really have to last 7 minutes? Why the random reference to "Dancing Queen" in the middle?), but by the third listen I was totally in love with it; the sense of unresolved danger in this song, like a cobra coiling tighter and tighter into a pre-strike position but never lunging when you expect it, makes it intoxicating, and I could have been happy even if the song lasted another 5 minutes.

Another strong highlight, which would have been the album highlight on a few Costello albums, is "15 Petals," a somewhat chaotic rocker with frantic rhythm work and an aggressive horn section that helps make the lack of clear memorability in the vocal parts into an advantage instead of a disadvantage. Seriously, I probably couldn't sing more than 5 seconds of the vocal melody if pressed, but I could definitely sing the nagging acoustic riff or snippets of the crazy descending horn lines, and that's enough for me.

The rest of the album is roughly split between the relatively "conventional" pop rock songs that were emphasized during much of the leadup to the album's release, and more bizarre material along the lines of the highlights, and both sides have their fair share of at least moderate winners. The album starts with three "normal" songs in a row, giving a distorted sense of the album's composition, and they're all pretty good; "45" (which touches on how Costello turned 45 between the last album and this one, but also alludes to other uses of the number, including the end of World War II and the speed of 7" singles) and "Tear Off Your Own Head (It's A Doll Revolution)" sound exactly like what I would describe as the generic Costello "rock" sound (to the extent that such a thing exists) mapped into the post-90s, while "Spooky Girlfriend" is based almost entirely off great bass and drum work with minimal keys and guitar (and an amusing vocal arrangement). "Tart" is another good inclusion to the "normal" pile, an intriguing distillation of jazz and various electronica influences into a bitter quiet ballad (except for the part in the middle when it gets noisy), and one that simultaneously sounds modern and timeless in the sort of way that Costello can so skillfully pull off at his best.

Among the somewhat more bizarre material, my favorites are the two variations of the same song, artfully placed so that the first variation is called "Dust 2 ..." and the second variation, a few tracks later, is "...dust." The first variation is noisy but controlled, with pounding drumming and angry guitars surfacing in the most efficient way possible for the song, while the second variation is similar to the first, with more emphasis on the great bass part and some horns thrown in for good measure. I also find myself greatly enjoying the penultimate "Episode of Blonde," which makes use of all of the arrangement resources at his disposal from the other material (that is, if it appeared on another track on this album, it probably appears here), but which also finds Costello tapping into his Dylan similarities with glee; I am probably 100% wrong on this, but I can't help but think that the "Blonde" mentioned here is a reference to Blonde on Blonde, and both the vocal tone and the bonkers stream-of-consciousness lyrics are reminiscient (though far from clones, Costello had too much of his own style for that) of the sorts of things Dylan could pull off in his '65-'66 peak.

Of the rest, the noisy, punkish "Dissolve" and "Daddy Can I Turn This?" are nice, if not especially remarkable rockers, and the rest is fine, if also not especially remarkable. "Alibi," for instance, is clearly trying to act as a lengthy counterweight to "When I Was Cruel No. 2," but it strikes me as stuck in an odd middle ground of trying to maintain a tight intensity while also trying not to maintain the same intensity as its counterpart, and thus it falls a little short of what I would want from an album I'd rate even higher. Still, these are relatively minor complaints, and overall I feel more enthusiasm for this album than for any non-collaboration Costello had done since Bloode and Chocolate. As with most Costello albums, this one requires a little effort as a listener, but it also yields greater benefits in relation to that effort than many of his albums do.

Everything on here is pretty and pleasant and enjoyable in broad strokes, but trying to identify highlights is an excruciating task. "Someone Took the Words Away," the album's second track, has a recurring set of piano chords that I somehow find lovelier than many of the recurring sets of piano chords elsewhere on the album, and the saxophone solo that emerges over them in the middle of the song makes for a lovely touch. Even better is "When it Sings," another piano-heavy ballad that sounds like it could have plausibly come from the recording sessions for many Costello albums; that seems like an odd compliment, yes, but it just means that it sounds like something that Costello would have written even if he wasn't trying to serve two masters, and it ends up standing out because of it.

I've listened to this album a very large number of times, and the other nine tracks might as well be one and the same, even if they each tend to reveal their unique melody and mood profiles on closer listening. I guess "Still" has a lighter sense of whimsy that helps the flow of the album, and the closing pair of "When Green Eyes Turn Blue" and "I'm in the Mood Again" complement each other well in bringing a sense of emotional resolution to the album, but trying to come up with something interesting to say about the rest of the material is an exercise where the required effort doesn't justify the payoff. That said, while finding especially good things to say about the individual tracks is hard, coming up with especially bad things to say about the individual tracks is even harder, and since I end up finding the album generally pretty even as I find it generally samey, it gets a good rating. At the very least, it's way better than the absurdly low 3.9/10 grade it got from Pitchfork.

MATTHEW CONSTANTINE (06/13/17)

In this case, I'm surprised you rated it as high as you did (!) It's always seemed to be the single most shockingly unsuccessful EC album (except "Il Sogno" maybe, but I don't feel able to comment on that).

He makes the mistake of ignoring the vocal limitations that come with advancing age, in order to prepare the most serpentine and / or the "fruitiest" chord progressions he could...then finding he was, by turns, either incapable of threading a melody through them or making impossible demands of his larynx. Which for someone who has added a lot to the "pop-jazz" corpus, is shocking. How did the author of "Almost Blue", "Love Field", "Inch By Inch", "Poisoned Rose", "For Other Eyes", "Baby Plays Around","and The Long Honeymoon" descend to this!

One can hardly blame him for going back to rock and country-rock basics for a while after this. A surprise, given what preceded it, that "Secret Profane and Sugarcane" didn't turn out to be a disaster, at all. (TBC)

Eventually, I changed my mind, and I now consider this the best album Costello had done since Blood and Chocolate. I'm not necessarily inclined to love the alt-country genre automatically, but much to my shock (given that Costello hadn't dabbled in this sort of music since King of America, and that had been during his brief hiatus away from The Attractions), this album suggests that it fits Costello and his band quite well. The genre's relative stylistic limitations work to Costello's benefit, making it more difficult for him to engage in the sorts of excess that had so often tended to cause Costello to outsmart himself, and the rest of the band sounds like they had been playing this sort of music for their entire careers. Furthermore, the album simply sounds great in a way that Costello albums with his full band hadn't sounded in a long time; the production is a little loud in the sort of way that production had tended to become in the 2000s, but it's also unobtrusive, and the album exudes a sense of sheer power (in both loud moments and in quiet moments, odd as that may seem) that makes it an intoxicating listen even when the songwriting might not be firing on all cylinders.

The heart of the album is a 4-song stretch starting from the title track, and even when I felt underwhelmed by the rest of the album I still really enjoyed this portion. The title track is a magnificent anthemic waltz, underpinned by quiet keyboards (of all sorts) and an insistent beat, and the ending portion, after the vocals have gone away, is surprisingly atmospheric and lovely. "Monkey to Man" is a pounding Stones-y rocker punctuated by a great little guitar line popping up repeatedly like a garden snake, and it's so memorable and so full of honky-tonk fun (while still sounding 100% like an Elvis Costello song) that I can't help but want to listen to it over and over. Coming next, "Nothing Clings Like Ivy" is a relatively conventional Costello-ish piano-centric ballad, but a top-notch one, and "The Name of This Thing is Not Love" is a relatively conventional Costello-ish mid-tempo angry-ish anthem, but also a top-notch one, and the result is a stretch that could bulster the album to an overall good-ish level even if the rest was half-written and boring (like I originally thought).

Fortunately, I no longer at all think the rest is half-written and boring. The opening "Button My Lip" is more about establishing the album's sound and overall approach than about creating something instantly memorable, but it immediately establishes that the album's sound is kinda awesome, full of meticulous drumming and active bass and the usual dose of super-vital keyboard work and noisy guitar texture. There's no coherent vocal melody, but Costello's interjections among the instrumental chaos are effective in their own way, and I wouldn't want the album to start in any other way. "Country Darkness" is a quieter but passionate country-ish number, harkening back strongly to King of America, and the quiet pedal steel from John McFee over the emotional punch of the other instruments provides terrific contrast. "There's a Story in Your Voice" has a country-ish twang and guest backing vocals from Lucinda Williams (a prominent solo artist in her own right), but it also has an angry snarl in the guitar parts that gives it a feel different from a typical country song, and once again the grafting of standard Costello elements into a country framework works remarkably. "Either Side of the Same Town," featuring a glorious moment of falsetto in the song's emotional climaxes, is a sorta country-soul-gospel ballad dripping with pathos, and the underpinning piano is especially worth noting in an album full of rousing piano parts. "Bedlam" is typical of Costello's more chaotic jazzy numbers, with the unsteady (not meant in a bad way) foundation courtesy of Thomas' skilled drumming, and with the vocal melody and the piano parts seemingly at war with the drums and each other. It's not one of my favorite songs on the album, but it doesn't really hurt things either.

On the other side of the central four-song stretch, the album doesn't exactly wind down on an ecstatic high note, but it doesn't wind down in a bad way either; I think of it as the album gracefully gliding to a dignified finish. "Heart Shaped Bruise" is a fairly straightforward anthemic country ballad, albeit with some melody and harmony choices that would never make it into a straightforward anthemic country ballad (like that closing repeated "it will fade" that is haunting as hell), and I always find it a slight letdown after what came before it, even if I like it on its own. "Needle Time" starts off as a fairly conventional Costello rocker (with the instrumental breaks sometimes featuring angry guitar and sometimes featuring an eerie organ) before morphing into a slow bluesy noisy stomp for the chorus (then going back to the rocker). Eventually, the song settles back into the slow bluesy noisy stomp for an extended coda that ends up functioning (to my ears) as an extended introduction to the next song, "The Judgement," a nice gospel number with a great prominent piano part; with different lyrics and a slightly different arrangement, I could have seen it fitting in somewhere on Get Happy!! pretty cleanly. And finally, the album ends in a very gentle but effective way with the quiet ukulele ballad "The Scarlet Tide," which Costello (and T-Bone Burnett) had originally written for the 2003 movie Cold Mountain (he got an Oscar nomination for the song, which had been sung by Alison Krauss), and which is redone here as a duet between Costello and Emmy-Lou Harris. The "obvious" ending would definitely have been "The Judgement," but my guess is that somebody decided it made sense to capitalize on the success that "The Scarlet Tide" had already shown and to get it on the album, and I'm glad this happened.

This album got mostly positive reviews, and I generally agree with the consensus level of praise, but at the same time, if The Rolling Stones had managed to write and perform the songs that made it onto this album, I feel like the writers at Rolling Stone would have gotten so excited that that they would have died of priapism. Any fan of Costello who gave up on him in the 90s or earlier absolutely needs to hear this, and I would wholeheartedly recommend this to anybody who likes Costello at all, even if only casually. Late-period peaks are a large part of the reason that I do these deep dives into various discographies in the first place, and man this album delivers.

...

...

(I'll show myself out).

At the same time, I feel kinda sorry for him. From my perspective, there's no question that I've essentially enjoyed this (at least to the extent that "I don't mind this at all and there are some bits I quite like" is the same as "enjoyment"), and I'm ultimately giving this a higher grade than, say, compilations of orchestral music that Frank Zappa wrote during this life. Here's the thing, though: while I don't especially enjoy Zappa's forays into classical music, since they touch on aspects of 20th century classical that I don't especially love, I also think it very likely that his pieces will receive programming to some meaningful extent, somewhere, 100 years from now. I can't especially speak to how many chances Zappa took with his pieces relative to the stylistic movements he was honoring, but I do know that the stylistic movements he honored took lots of chances themselves, and a serious study of 20th century classical in the centuries to come will have to reckon with them, one way or another. But a work like this? The aspects that make it easily consumable and listenable are also those aspects that doom it to long-run irrelevancy, whereas Costello's "regular" career, less sophisticated it might be in pure technical terms, will have made a lasting mark that will require consideration from those who someday study popular culture from the 1970s through the 2000s or so. I can simply see no reason why this would become a part of anybody's regular listening regimen, whether a Costello fan or a lover of classical music or otherwise.

Il Sogno is absolutely worth three listens for a fan of Costello, but it doesn't merit a fourth, and I'm hardpressed to indicate why anybody else should bother. Frankly, if you're looking for a classical interpretation of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" by a rock-related artist, you should go with the one Steve Hackett did; at least that has a lot of nice classical guitar scattered throughout.

The conversation portions shouldn't be skipped over either, and they're large part of why I ultimately rate this as high as I do. McPartland is a master interviewer (not shocking given that she had been doing this for 25 years by this point), able to draw out interesting discussion while simultaneously veering it towards the scheduled material, and Costello shows in the course of discussion that he's every bit as thoughtful about his career and the process of making music as you might expect of him. He touches on his early days as an aspiring musician, talks about how his writing process and how it's evolved through the years, shares some interesting stories concerning his professional interactions with varous notable jazz musicians, muses on his love for blue ballads despite his generally cheerful disposition, and conveys a lot of insight into the selected material that makes me value it more highly than I might have otherwise (for instance, "They Didn't Believe Me" somewhat passed me by on The Juliet Letters, but now, knowing that it's from around the start of WWI, it's a song that I now notice much more strongly). Costello's reputation as one of rock's smarter fellows definitely holds up after giving this a few listens.

If the idea of two older people having a quiet discussion about low-key jazz and then playing it sounds like the least cool thing imaginable, then you probably won't have any desire to listen to this. If you like jazz, though, and you consider yourself a pretty strong fan of Costello overall, this is almost certainly worth your time. I'm kind of sad that I never knew about this program (of which many episodes covering many artists have apparently been released on CD) before McPartland retired and then died.

I had pretty much no familiarity with Toussaint before listening to this, and while I can't speak to how the original versions of the songs written by Toussaint sound in relation to how they sound here, I would say that these songs are impressive enough to make me want to find some more material by him (if only a greatest hits album). Only one of them is sung by Toussaint here ("Who's Gonna Help Brother Get Further?"), with Costello taking lead vocals otherwise, but there's an edge of anger crossed with peppy verve that I find very attractive amongst Toussaint's jazzy New Orleans R&B, and it shows a strong personality that can easily stand along that of Costello's. My favorite is the opening "On Your Way Down" (which mixes exciting jazzy piano with bluesy swagger and features the great line "The same people you misuse on your way up / you might need up / on your way down"), but the energetic fire of "Tears, Tears and More Tears" (full of great horns crossed with rousing piano and organ) and the piano-heavy gospel majesty of "Freedom for the Stallion" are pretty great as well. Not all of them are superb, but at worst they're enjoyable background, filled to the brim with exciting horn parts that keep me from getting too bored.

Among the songs that Costello had involvement in, the highlight is definitely the title track, an angry bluesy/jazzy protest song that captures the frustration of the region in the aftermath of Katrina, and which would have absolutely killed at the benefit concerts where it premiered. While the songs that Costello wrote with Toussaint aren't as immediately striking as that one, though, there are some clear highlights worth noting. "The Sharpest Thorn" is a gentle gospel ballad as lovely as anything Costello ever wrote, "Ascension Day" (adapted by Elvis and Allen from music written by Roy Byrd, a long dead New Orleans blues pianist) is a fascinating combination of loose Elvis rambling and great Allen piano, "International Echo" is top-notch classic New Orleans jazz crossed with an odd Costello hook (the seam between the two parts is pretty stark, but it's so weird that I forgive it), and the closing "Six Finger Man" is an incredible encapsulation of all the blues, jazz, R&B and rock elements that went into everything before it.

Yes, this can be summarized in brief as essentially just one of Costello's genre exercise albums, and it's not impeccable, but it's a fine genre exercise album, and Costello shows an ease with this music that he almost certainly couldn't have achieved 20 or even 10 years earlier. If nothing else, this is the Costello album that I would most likely feel inclined to put on as the background music for a party, and while that's not exactly my main criteria for judging how I feel about a given album, it also doesn't hurt. I can't imagine a Costello fan not enjoying this collaboration a lot, at least not unless they hate all music made by black people.

My favorite song here is somewhat symbolic of the album as a whole: less impressive if I focus on it extremely closely and think hard about it, but a total blast when experienced a little more casually. The tangible musical material of "Stella Hurt" basically consists of a single simple riff (sometimes on guitar, sometimes on piano) hammered on ad nauseum, with tight drumming underpinning it throughout while Costello yammers on with lyrics that sound good in the moment, and while it's much more of a jam than a song per se (the track just cuts off at the end without even attempting to work its way to a proper resolution), it's such an intoxicating jam that I can't fault it in any way. Another song that seems like a total mess but is so full of interesting guitar noise and rhythm (and some occasional nice vocal harmonies, courtesy of Jenny Lewis and some others with whom the Imposters started recording before Elvis showed up) that I really like it is "Turpentine," which drowns some nice memorable vocal hooks in chaos that should ruin the song but instead makes it a delight. For those seeking a little more clear structure in their rockers (not with Costello at his peak as a songwriter, but with a little less chaos while maintaining a high level of energy), songs like "No Hiding Place," "American Gangster," the acoustic "Drum and Bone" (with some great drumming and organ to make the song pop without any guitar amplification), and the closing "Go Away" (built around a simple organ line and a pounding drum beat and with some strong hooks that might be a touch underdeveloped but who cares) should satisfy just fine.

The album has its share of quieter songs as well, and while not generally among Costello's best material, they're mostly fine. My preference leans more towards the light-hearted jazzy "Harry Worth" more than the somewhat plodding jazzy "Flutter & Wow," or towards the lighthearted and playful "Mr. Feathers" more than the somewhat sappy "My Three Sons" (where Costello gets personal and it somehow doesn't really fit him), but there's good to be found in all of them, and the last two quieter songs ("Song with Rose," which feels to me like it should have been an 80s R.E.M. song even though I can't come up with a clear match for it, and "Pardon Me, Madam, My Name is Eve," which paints a hilariously awful and bitter picture of a situation involving a jilted lover) help lead the album to a pretty strong finish (capped off by "Go Away").

No, this wouldn't make my top ten of Costello albums, but it might make my top fifteen, and I'm glad that he ended up changing his mind on deciding never to record again in order to make this. It's an album for hardcore fans, and even then it's necessary to go into it with proper expectations, but with all of those caveats properly noted, it's quite an enjoyable listen. Costello's remarkable string of B/B+ album-making marches on.

While I find the album somewhat pandering overall, I also end up liking it overall, and there are definitely a handful of clear highlights that I can pick out among the generally pleasant background nature of the whole. The opening "Down Among the Wine and Spirits" would probably work better on an album where bluegrass was the exception but not the rule, but it's a pleasant shuffle, packed full of all of the arrangements I'd hope to hear in an archtypical bluegrass song. The acoustic remake of "Complicated Shadows" (originally done with electric instruments back on All This Useless Beauty) is tons of fun, and I actually kinda wish that he'd considered going the route of re-recording an entire album's worth of old material with these musicians rather than making new material; it probably would have been a blast. Jumping ahead quite a bit, "How Deep is the Red?" has an ambiguous darkness (even with the cheerful instrumentation that doesn't quite let it gloomy as it might get in another context) that I find rather attractive (it's one of several leftovers here from an attempt at an opera about Hans Christian Andersen), the lengthy "Red Cotton" is a rather touching ballad (careening between majestic and playful in mood) taking the guise of a 19th century abolitionist (this is another one from the Hans Christian Andersen project), and the closing cover of the old standard "Changing Partners" ends up working rather well in a Nashville context. My favorite of the lot, though, is definitely "Sulphur to Sugarcane," which might be overlong but is just such a playful delight of cheerful fiddle and (I'm pretty sure) mandolin that I never notice the length until it's over, and the line "It's not very far from sulphur to sugarcane" is just so intriguing. The rest is good enough, but the tracks aren't worth discussing individually, and thus I won't.

What I find most peculiar about this particular album is that my overall experience of getting to know it was significantly different from my experience with most Costello albums that I've previously not been closely familiar with. I really enjoyed this one the first couple of times I listened to it, and my initial assumption was that I would end up gushing over it as an example of how Costello can make surprisingly good "spontaneous" music even when his reputation is primarily as somebody who ends up overcomplicating things. Alas, as nice as it sounded at first, additional listens ended up revealing some of the flimsiness of the project more than they revealed additional positive details, and I even briefly considered giving this a lower grade before settling on a reasonable compromise between my initial and later impressions (this is on the lower end of 9 ratings, for what it's worth). Even if this album shows Costello sleepwalking a bit, it betrays that even a sleepwalking Costello could still put out enjoyable and (sometimes) impressive music.

In much the same way that I find Get Happy!! easiest to approach if I think of it as divided into 4 sections of 5 songs a piece, this one becomes more digestible to me when I approach it as 4 sections of 4 songs a piece. The opening title track is a noisy guitar rocker that probably could have fit in well enough on any Costello album in the previous 20-odd years (it's fine, but we've heard the like from him many times before, and I have to admit that when I heard it the first time, it put me in a slightly annoyed "here we go again" mode), but the next three show that the album is going to go in some unexpected directions. "Jimmie Standing in the Rain" could very easily be a leftover (and a top-notch one at that) from Muswell Hillbillies, a jazzy/vaudeville ballad with horn and fiddle thrown on top, and it's lots of fun. "Stations of the Cross," then, pulls us forcefully back into modernity with a moody mid-tempo number built around a strong drum part and skilled minimalist piano, and the way it blends old and new styles definitely reminds me of peak late-period (Heathen onward) Bowie. Best of all from this initial batch, though, is the most lighthearted number of the group: the old-timey up-tempo acoustic/bluegrass number "A Slow Drag With Josephine" is Costello at his absolute most charming, and when he breaks out the whistling part at the end I'm just smitten. On a certain level, this is a throwaway, yes, but on another level, it's the kind of track that exposes his songwriting chops the most clearly.

The next batch starts with another rocker, courtesy of "Five Small Words," a somewhat rambling number in the verses that nonetheless has a great echo-filled guitar lick that it keeps returning to, and that's enough to make me like it quite a bit. "Church Underground" is a piano-heavy (eventually building the importance of guitars and drums) dose of over-emoting that rambles its way to resolution with its "chorus," and it's not one of my favorites on the album, but I do rather like the way he sings the word "Halellujah," if nothing else. "You Hung the Moon" and "Bullets for the New-Born King," on the other hand, are each teriffic ballads in their own way; "You Hung the Moon" is a 50s-style Sinatra orchestrated number, and "Bullets for the New-Born King" is one of the best acoustic ballads he ever wrote, simple as that.

Batch three kicks off "I Lost You," a top-notch up-tempo country-pop-rocker (King of America would have been better if it included this song), and stays at a high level. "Dr. Watson, I Presume" is dark acoustic-centered (with some grumbling guitar in the background for effect) atmospheric tension, "One Bell Ringing" is even better dark acoustic-centered atmospheric tension, with some uncomfortable horn parts and growling guitar tucked into the background, and the echo-filled notes of the last 30 seconds make me so happy I can't see straight. Rounding out the group is "The Spell That You Cast," a happy pop rocker (which sounds more like classic Attractions than anything else here) that couldn't sound more different from the previous two tracks (except in the brief moments where the happiness modulates into something less pleasant) but sounds all the better for it.

The final batch kicks off with "That's Not the Part of Him You're Leaving," a slow and gentle country ballad with some passion in the singing, then goes into "My Lovely Jezebel," a fun up-tempo rocker full of fantastic slide guitar to complement the standard Costello rocker elements (including fun piano in the end portion). "All These Strangers" is a lengthy slow acoustic ballad, and while I wouldn't have minded had it been a little shorter than 5:53, it's lovely enough and varied enough to make me not mind the length too much. And finally, "A Voice in the Dark" continues the typical Costello habit of ending albums on a high note, this time with a fun country-ish vaudeville number, and if you're not humming the tune to yourself for ten minutes after the album ends there might be something wrong with you.

No, this isn't quite a great album (the material is good but the album construction is better), and its grade is somewhat borderline, but it's such an interesting and fun album that I'm really quite surprised that I felt so cold towards it at first (silly me, I actually liked this considerably less than Sugarcane the first couple of times I listened to each). If you're only going to get one post-prime (using Blood and Chocolate as the cutoff) Costello album, it should still probably be The Delivery Man, but this is just about as worthy as that one. Kudos to the man sticking such a remarkable album near the end of his career to reward me for the seemingly endless trek through his albums.

In broad strokes, I'm not entirely sure how I feel about a collaboration between Costello and The Roots at this point in his career. He clearly wasn't going to stay in the general approach of Sugarcane or National Ransom forever (the fact that he'd even made two albums in a row that were that similar was remarkable, and those albums still had some significant differences from each other), and if any aging British pop-rocker could work with a group like The Roots without making a total ass of himself in 2013 it would have been Costello, but nonetheless I can never quite separate myself from the mild absurdity of Costello reinventing himself as a woke funk-rocker in his late 50s. I actually think it's to Costello's credit that he doesn't go too far afield in stretching himself in this collaboration - this is a funk/R&B album, not a hip-hop album, which is good because Costello trying to make a legitimate hip-hop album in 2013 would have been absolutely preposterous - but even in somewhat staying true to his main strengths I'm not sure how much success he achieved in this collaboration. At times, I find myself absolutely blown away by what those involved with this album managed to achieve, but in many other stretches I find myself getting bored by music that, as tight and energetic as it might be, feels a little automated and stiff.

My favorite tracks are tucked near the end, though the tracks that I'd rate just behind them are clustered near the beginning. "Cinco Minutos Con Vos" is a glorious tense mix of descending horns, slow throbbing bass, tight drumming, sparse orchestration (courtesy of The Brent Fischer Orchestra), and a great guest vocal from Marisol Hernandez ("La Marisoul"), and it's definitely one of the sexiest songs Costello has ever been associated with. "Wise Up Ghost" is its own big ball of tension, built around descending licks from the horns, guitars and orchestration, pitted against a static (in a good way) vocal part with "Wise up ghost!" backing vocals emerging from time to time, and the slow build in intensity from start to finish impresses me a lot. Other strong highlights include the opening single "Walk Us Uptown" (featuring great rhythm section work and an insistent organ part butting in from time to time), the slow groover "Sugar Won't Work," and the hyper-intense funk groove that is "Refuse to be Saved," where the tightness of The Roots as an ensemble is displayed in all of its glory. Slightly behind (but only slightly) is "Stick Out Your Tongue," a reworking of "Pills and Soap" into a modern slow-burn funk groover, and while I'm not sure I'd take this over the original (I'd rather hear the young brash Costello do this than the old brash Costello), it's a lot of fun when on.

The other half isn't bad, but I don't find it as striking as the best stuff on here. "Wake Me Up" just can't get me excited in the immediate wake of "Refuse to be Saved" (sticking a decent mid-tempo groover immediately after a top-notch intense groove like "Refuse to be Saved" was not the best sequencing decision I've ever heard), the gentler material ("Tripwire," the closing "If I Could Believe") is pleasant but forgettable in a generic Costello way, and the other three tracks just leave no lasting impression on me at all (I enjoy them when on and immediately forget them thereafter). Sadly, that's half of the album, which means that no matter how much fun I find the other material, a "Good" rating is the very best I can do. Still, while I wouldn't rate this as among his best material, I find it at least somewhat interesting that he attempted a collaboration in this vein, and it probably could have been much worse. Oddly, this turned out to be his last album (at least as of writing, there was a 4 year gap with no indication of new material coming), and while it's not the ideal swan-song that National Ransom could have been, it's not an embarrassment either.

The first three songs on this album are pretty spectacular, and they also highlight the three songwriting combinations that feature on this album: Costello alone, Costello in collaboration with Burt Bacharach, and Costello in collaboration with Carole King. The opening "Under Lime," written by Costello alone, is one of the best anthems of his career, with the keyboards featured prominently along with the guitar/bass/drums, centered around a long elaborate multi-part melody that culminates in either a marching band or in wordless "ba ba ba" chanting, and it's so gripping and memorable and passionate from start to finish that I'm largely left in awe. "Don't Look Now," written by Costello along with Burt Bacharach, absolutely would have been a highlight on Painted From Memory, not because it tries to stand out, but because of its delicate restraint, and while I initially overlooked the song because it was sandwiched between two giant anthems, I now think it's a terrific palette cleanser. "Burnt Sugar is So Bitter," then, is the collaboration between Costello and Carole King, a pounding dance number with super thick production (again in a way that draws comparisons to Imperial Bedroom, but thicker), featuring a nagging recurring upward keyboard part and well-placed horns, and every time it finishes I want to listen to it again right away.

The rest of the album more or less splits between and gentle and pounding, and both sides have strong representatives, even if nothing quite lives up to the album's terrific start. In the next three tracks, "Stripping Paper" is a good gentle piano-based ballad that probably could have fit on any number of Costello albums, "Unwanted Number" is a pounding number (about an unwanted pregnancy) centered around another terrific recurring keyboard part, and if "I Let the Sun Go Down" becomes a bit of a bombastic slog, it also has a very well-timed inclusion of Costello whistling to give it some badly needed whimsy. Of the final six tracks, I'm most partial to "Mr. and Mrs. Hush" (a pounding number based around a great piano riff with some lively horns on top), "Suspect My Tears" (a gentle orchestrated ballad that I initially assumed was one of the Bacharach collaborations, but no, Costello came up with that chorus himself), and the closing "He's Given Me Things" (one of the Bacharach collaborations, and a surprisingly melancholy and moving way to end the album), but the other three are fine as well (they just somewhat come across as doing similar things as other tracks on the album, but in a slightly inferior way).

Obviously, I wouldn't go so far as to put this album in Costello's top tier; as much as I like many of his exercises in the world of baroque pop, his rock-centric output is the core of his legacy, and albums like this (and Imperial Bedroom or Painted From Memory) are essentially nice supplements to that output. Nonetheless, if this isn't in his top tier, then I would place it near the very top of the next tier, and I would absolutely recommend it to any fan of his who hasn't gotten around to hearing it. Like all Costello albums, this one took several listens to make any lasting impression with me, but when it broke through, it broke through in a big way.