best post-'80s Elvis Costello album

Brutal Youth has awful, awful production.

"Brutal Youth" has gorgeous production. The best production on any Elvis Costello album.

My gf contends that WIWC is his best album. I think she's nuts, but since I haven't heard most of these, I'll vote for that on her behalf.

I hate to agree with Geir about anything, but I love the production on Brutal Youth, as well as the songs. His strongest post-Blood & Chocolate set, I think.

Considering throwing a sympathy vote to When I Was Cruel, which I thought at the time was absolutely marvy, and as I recall has only one serious dud on it ("My Little Blue Window": sounds like he needed an "Elvis Costello song" to pad out an album of departures and weirdness). Also think Mighty Like a Rose is underappreciated, though there are some heinous stinkers on it ("Hurry Down Doomsday", "Broken"). The Costello & Nieve set might take this if it hadn't been a promo-only release; it really made me appreciate the awesomeness of All This Uselees Beauty, which is a nostalgic favourite. For me, the shark-jumping moment was North, and nothing after it has stuck with me for a minute.

Might have to relisten to some of this.

Fuck it, I'm going Brutal Youth. "WHAT IS YOUR DESTINY?"

"Mighty Like a Rose" IMO showed the potential of Costello/Froom that wasn't really fulfilled until "Brutal Youth". Loved the singles though, particularly "So Like Candy".

As for his recent Deutche Grammofon albums, I guess I'll file them together with Il Divo and Josh Groban......

I'm certain Costello & Nieve saw commercial release after originally being promos only.

Juliet Letters is fucking great, but no one else ever seems to think so

When I Was Cruel for me. Wonder if anyone at all is going to vote for El Songo...?

I think there's a general apprehension about his non-rock collaborative albums, but if I was going to pick up any of them it'd probably be Juliet Letters.

as I said upthread, Costello & Nieve was tossed out of the running for being live and full of pre-'90s compositions, not because of promo or limited edition status.

i think part of it is im going to listen to his rocking stuff i might as well listen to any of the earlier albums, why settle for anything from this period? altho the creeping Krallisms in the later period stuff is just ugghghghhhhh

burt bacharach collab is by far the worst thing on this list tho

you LIE

like honestly even if you don't dig on that album it excels at its particular niche and there are at least a half dozen failed experiments and bloated indulgences that it's not nearly as bad as

as I said upthread, Costello & Nieve was tossed out of the running for being live and full of pre-'90s compositions, not because of promo or limited edition status.

But you left in the Bill Frisell Deep Dead Blue collaboration - a live recording of primarily old songs and covers.

well that's me fucking up and not knowing much about that record tbh

Fair enough!

I'm not always a fan of his production (including 70s and 80s, tbh), so the live recordings are my first pick when I'm in a Costello mood.

haha just spotted this on another thread on new answers, perfect regurgitation of the horseshit comeback narrative of WIWC:

oseph cotten (joseph cotten) wrote this on thread Are there any artist(s) who, many years after the quality of their work had dwindled or halted altogether, actually came back and released another significant album? on board I Love Music on Nov 4, 2005

Elvis Costello, with "When I Was Cruel," after about 18-20 years of experiments in genteel tedium.

AFAIC, the best Costello of any vintage is this year's Live at Hollywood High. The Attractions are smokin'.

listening to Momofuku, not as bad as I remember it, the band sounds great and relaxed, but it's still probably the slightest set of songs he ever recorded with Nieve & Thomas

finally checked out Mighty Like A Rose and it's pretty nice, definitely one of the better albums on the list, I think the title/cover art just made it seem so boring that I avoided it for a long time.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

ok so now i dont feel so alone! also, "15 petals" from WIWC is a really great song.

Didn't see this poll. Brutal Youth, All This Useless Beauty and Momofuku are the best ones.

Man, The Juliet Letters just about turned me off EC for good! Sounded (to my young ears) like a Kronos Quartet record played backwards while somebody shouted a Harold Pinter play at it.

Listening to WIWC right now for the first time in some years. Gah! There's something of Imperial Bedroom's kitchen-sink experimentalism about it, I think. Maybe not coincidental that it's also evidently a post-breakup album. I usually maintain that Bruce Thomas is among the best of rock bassists, but the cat he's got impostering for Thomas is mucho wicked on this. Seemed to herald a new era of something-being-at-stake in his work

Then he hooked up with Krall and all that promise was rendered useless.

OK, done: what a great record! Among his best, I think. I'd vote "Alibi" off the island - I really hate it (and had forgotten how much). The chorus is pretty nifty, but the verses with the repeated "Alibi, alibi" refrain are awful, and the whole thing builds to a really lame punchline undeserving of the venom w/which it's spit: "PAPA'S GOT A BRAND NEW" ick. "My Little Blue Window" is actually a great little song, but it doesn't belong here - it could have been his most best-loved B-side instead. "Dissolve"'s a little dull. Otherwise: I hope he breaks up with Krall soon so we can have just one more venomous monolith like this from him.

haha i was just about to bring up "Alibi" as one of the (several) rancid dogs that makes WIWC undeserving of the votes it got. but then, i'm generally ill at ease with his sprawling 15 songs kitchen sink records, i prefer when he's got a more cohesive sound or concept to hang everything on.

i feel like your characterization of his Krall years is based entirely on North, though, Delivery Man rocks pretty hard at times.

Some sensible lurkers.

agree about Alibi -- for some reason, EC seems to think it's a real crowd pleaser (he's played it every time I've seen him since WIWC was released), but it's pretty unbearable.

How do I not own a copy of Brutal Youth anymore? Must have pressed it into somebody's hands while drunk.

So, The Delivery Man instead. Liked it when it came out but it soon lost its lustre. Only thing I can remember offhand is that "Monkey" song (enh) and "The Scarlet Tide" which is probably one of my favourite single EC moments.

Hm, some alright stuff on here: "Either Side of the Same Town" sounds pretty classic, even if the vocal performance won't let it punch its weight. I recall thinking at the time that this band was getting as close to GP's 'cosmic American music' as anyone ever does: a rock-country-soul hybrid that sounds both organic and compelling, and I still think that in spots, but the songs don't have the traction they need to pin this album as anything but half-decent. Rocking hard isn't incompatible with a lack of conviction. Got to admit this album has its moments, though ("all the words of tenderness...")

http://www.robertchristgau.com/icon/s2.gif

Huge profile of EC in this week's New Yorker. It's not available online but you can read the beginning here.

there’s some amazing shit on brutal youth, “london’s brilliant parade” oh man <3 beautiful song.

I think my favorite aspects of the “froom sound” occur when things get mellow. I like what he gets out of organs.. I love los lobos’ colossal head (another smoky tube-y froom produced album from around this time)

It's rare I say a production lets down an album. BY has the songs, but, gad, Froom's mix is a clattery, ugly thing.

om

Love the sound of BY

"Toledo" from Painted From Memory is one of THE best songs

I finally got into that album when we did Wishin' and Votin' - the BURT BACHARACH SONGBOOK Poll Results

AGreed!

Everything from Spike to All This Useless is pretty great, the covers record excepted. After that it’s all like one long album. Some of the songs on WIWC are ok but the singing and guitar-playing are atrocious

Everything? Great?

I like the spike-mighty-brodsky-brutal-useless run, yes

spike was the first ec record I heard, and brodsky was the first i bought, so they’re ,ore sentimental choices for me

Gotta be at least 10-15 of his best songs spread across those albums, and they’re the last gasp before he starts oversinging on absolutely everything

I don't think I've heard a single one of his 21st Century records. Even when I saw him live he played very little post-Imperial Bedroom, I recognized nearly every song

I gave his post-'80s work a few more chances over the years, and while it's still not a patch on the magnificent albums that came between 1977 to 1986, he's recorded at least a few dozen gems. It's telling that one frequent complaint (or observation) I see from critics is how a song they glanced over from this period will be a pleasant surprise in concert or how a good song debuted in concert will come off as a disappointment when it's eventually released on an album. He can and continues to write good songs (mainly for himself - he may be the greatest songwriter since Dylan, but more often than not, other people have a difficult time interpreting his songs). And during the '90s and '00s, he was consistently an excellent performer in concert. But when it comes to making records, he's become spotty and inconsistent.

Of his studio albums, "When I Was Cruel" is easily his best - a little long but the one excellent album he's made since the '80s. "Painted from Memory" took a long time to grow on me, but I now think it's a fine pop album. "Brutal Youth" and "All This Useless Beauty" took some time to grow on me too - still a bit spotty, but they're generally good albums.

(a few dozen gems as in tracks, not albums)

he may be the greatest songwriter since Dylan

I can't think of a way I could agree with this proposition but I am wondering when you take "Dylan" to be to make this work for yourself?

I'm not sure I completely understand what you mean by "when" as there's no exact point in time, partly because Dylan is still active.

"Best songwriter since X" requires X to be a point in time or a period, I think, especially if X is a living person?

I suppose really I'm trying to judge quite how highly you're rating EC. Greater than Lennon and McCartney?

I don't think the expression should be taken entirely that way. Obviously there's a time when X becomes established or starts producing relevant or notable work, but that work presumably continues, and even if X becomes less active or consistent, the well doesn't necessarily runs dry of notable work. So everything commendable by X to date is fair game, and any comparison applies to anyone who makes a name for themselves after X does

Lennon/McCartney doesn't really fit in the conversation well because it's the songwriting of two distinct writers. Though there is a measure of collaboration and both influenced the other (and evaluated each others work), it was never really a partnership the way traditional partnerships worked.

Haha yeah alright mate I was just trying to understand the depth of your challop, because I love a good challop.

The new album, The Boy Named If is surprisingly fun, consistently good and easy to like. I wasn't sure if he'd ever sound this focused and energized ever again - it crushes the overrated Look Now, and they even pull off the experiments "The Man You Love to Hate" and "Trick Out the Truth." (Probably not highlights to me, but they don't hurt the album.) He's done a shitload of albums since the '80s - two dozen? 30? I lost count - and of those there are six that I more or less like overall, one of which is technically a collection of live EP's. This is probably better than all of them. He's not breaking a whole lot of new ground, but he's playing up to his strengths and following through on the execution. So yes, probably his best since the '80s.

Agreed.

I'll have more to say next week.

And it sounds great.

Can't wait to read it! Meanwhile, I'm going to savor this with the relief that he didn't try something like a violin concerto.

At the very least this is his most *exciting* album since "When I was Cruel" (regardless of how anyone feels about that one).

Very funny story in the Jerry Marotta interview I posted on the Gabriel thread. I'll do my best to sum up.

Marotta had been hired by T-Bone Burnett to work on "Spike." Burnett told him, look, Elvis doesn't want you on the record, but I do, so just be cool and it will all work out. And then Burnett leaves for another session at the same time, saying something like "my job is to get the best musicians in the room together, and then I leave before I fuck it up!" So EC arrives and Marotta, politely, asks EC what he'd like him to do on the take. EC gives him some vague instruction and Marotta nails it on the first take. So the next song he's supposed to do he asks EC again, and EC, already impressed, basically says "you know what to do." At this point Marotta recalls something strange his brother Rick (also a drummer) once told him: "If you ever see Elvis Costello, punch that motherfucker for me! I will *pay* you to kick that motherfucker's ass!" So Jerry is wondering what's up.

Some time later he is working on the Ron Sexsmith record with Bruce Thomas, and he asks Bruce Thomas what's up. Bruce says he knows exactly what he's talking about. At some point a few years earlier, Rick Marotta was leaving the Chateau Marmont and there were some suitcases blocking his car. It turns out he was leaving the same time as EC and the Attractions, who, according to Bruce, had just gotten back from South America, where they had been doing a *ton* of cocaine, basically up for three weeks. So needless to say, tensions were ... high, and EC did not react well to someone who dared tell him to move his shit. Rick Marotta was about to punch him when someone defused things a little, though saying "you can't hit him, that's Elvis Costello" apparently made Rick want to punch him more. Bruce Thomas told Jerry it was "bad." Sometime toward the end of the session Bruce gave Jerry a copy of his book "The Big Wheel" to give to Rick, and the inscription read "Dear Rick, Don't worry, I hit him for you."

Marotta ended up doing seven songs in two days for "Spike," and EC even asked him to tour.

PaulTMA at 9:52 21 Jan 22

Album is great and his best in many years but compressed to shit. Need a vinyl rip asap

Everytime I check out a new EC record it really sounds harsh

xp LMAO

See, this is the first album since The Juliet Letters that doesn't sound shitty. An immediate attraction.

i guess compression is in the ear of the behearer. i'm spinning the vinyl and that first track is a clattering bucket of mush. and supposedly the vinyl is preferable to the cd. on the other hand it sounds like there's a good batch of tunes in there somewhere. in 10 years when this madness ends they'll be releasing the "uncompressed remasters."

I wasn't consciously trying to pick up the energy, but I'd had the pleasure of listening to [producer] Sebastian Krys' mix of Spanish Model, which involved listening to the original instrumental tracks that we cut 43 years earlier [for This Year's Model]. When Sebastian pushed the faders up in and around these different Latin artists singing adaptations of my lyrics from all that time ago, he found all sorts of power and energy in the band. I think you'll find there are some tracks on Spanish Model where the band actually sounds more forceful [than on the original album]. We were all excited to hear what the singers brought back to us in their adaptation — bearing in mind that the three of us [in the Imposters] have been working together 44 years, on and off. It never harms to get a reminder of what it feels like to do something thrilling. Sometimes you want to concentrate on a ballad, as I did in Paris for Hey Clockface. Sometimes you want to let yourself go.

From a People magazine interview

https://people.com/music/elvis-costello-releases-the-boy-named-if-exclusive-interview/

I'm not really hearing what people like about this record, it sounds like the usual mess to me, maybe slightly better than usual but not significantly. It's the same problem with every Imposters record since The Delivery Man - just too much guitar. I don't like the way EC plays guitar!

I tend to agree but I gave up long before that. Are you saying you like The Delivery Man or is it the one before that, whatever that is?

I don't like his guitar playing either, hence my relief when it sounded well-mixed here.

It's almost weird that he never really, um, improved his technique, unlike Alex Chilton and Marshall Crenshaw, as discussed on a recent Alex Chilton revive.

I thought Crenshaw demonstrated he could write excellent lead lines from the beginning?

I would've wanted Crenshaw as a sessioneer in the '80s and '90s.

I guess maybe he was always good. But also had the impression that he got better with age.

I tend to agree but I gave up long before that. Are you saying you like The Delivery Man or is it the one before that, whatever that is?

I guess the last one I really enjoyed all the way through was All This Useless Beauty. Am a big, sentimental fan of Spike, Mighty Like A Rose and Juliet Letters because they're the first EC albums I listened (and also I think they're pretty good).

I don't like the songs on When I Was Cruel, but it's (at the very least) a distinctive-sounding record compared to what came after it, which to me all sound like boring reduxes of Blood and Chocolate

Since then I've enjoyed his interviews more than his music

A late favourite as a counterpoint:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-oJzEhR3Obw

(Although late = still 26 years old)

That Marotta story is funny.

Generally I am a longtime EC stan, but I agree that his guitar playing is... um. Sometimes it's exactly what's needed. Sometimes it's inoffensive. And then sometimes it just doesn't need to be there at all!

I mean, the dude can can call in James muthaflippin Burton. Or Charlie Sexton. Or Marc Ribot. Or various people called "T-Bone."

I don't think he's ever claimed to be a virtuoso, just a highly idiosyncratic practitioner. And in a live setting, I can understand why playing guitar himself allows him to connect with and shape the song in a way that he couldn't if he were just in front of a band singing.

I don't think he is a bad player (the guitar work on TYM rules!) just that he consistently defaults to this toneless, strumming-old-man-with-an-overdrive-pedal sound

marshall has def. done some woodshedding over the years.

I don't think I ever disliked EC's guitar playing...or rather, if I did, I didn't like the overall record anyway, so his guitar playing never stood out as being the thing that sunk a record. I always liked the nickname "Little Hands of Concrete"...

I still not convinced that this album is much better than solid, but "Paint the Red Rose Blue" sure is pretty.

I'd agree it's solid.

New album seems promising, thanks yall. I haven't really kept up with him since the 80s, but remember thinking he'd had some kind of emotional breakthrough, rather than just singing lessons (although maybe those too), to put across those songs so well, on Painted From Memory---mind you, I thought it would have sounded even better if they'd presented the whole thing to Dionne Warwick, for lead or solo vocals--but still. Maybe it was that he'd loved Bacharach so long, even covering him on Stiffs Live, and the chance to write with him, the challenge of it too, made a breakthrough baby. Also mind you, I haven't heard it since 2000 at the latest, don't know what I'd think now. But my friend had the edition with a bonus disc collection, EC performing some of those songs here and there, also very nice indeed.
Local jazz station still occasionally plays tracks from the xp Frisell version:
...The Sweetest Punch...consists of jazz arrangements of the Painted From Memory songs done by Frisell and his studio group. It features vocals by Costello on two songs, and by jazz singer Cassandra Wilson on two songs, one of which ... The Sweetest Punch, was made concurrently by jazz guitarist Bill Frisell, released in 1999 on another Universal label, Decca Records. It consists of jazz arrangements of the Painted From Memory songs done by Frisell and his studio group. It features vocals by Costello on two songs, and by jazz singer Cassandra Wilson on two songs, one of which is a duet employing both.

Fuck, sorry!