best post-'80s Elvis Costello album

Did Elvis have a big bush beard at that show?

I'm not sure about this, but I think my first exposure to Elvis Costello was through an SNL re-run...but not the famous one where he stops "Less Than Zero" and plays the not-yet-released "Radio Radio." I mean the one from the '90s where he was appearing in support of Mighty Like a Rose, and unknown to me he looked nothing like the Elvis Costello people knew:

http://www.elviscostello.info/wiki/images/5/54/1991-05-18_SNL_s01.jpg

He wasn't playing anything that would be remembered as a classic, which is probably why a few years later, I was kind of bewildered to see his name consistently mentioned in music guides as an artist I should check out. I vaguely remembered thinking - "I know I've seen him...really?" When I finally broke down and got My Aim Is True, I was immediately surprised by how much I liked it. I made sense of my initial confusion when I eventually worked my way through the entire Warner catalog.

*bushy

Also that photo doesn't seem to be coming up so here's a direct link: http://www.elviscostello.info/wiki/images/5/54/1991-05-18_SNL_s01.jpg

he looked nothing like the Elvis Costello people knew

He has said this was the point of the beard and hair

It actually brings to mind Luke Wilson in The Royal Tenebaums, but with the ornate cap in place of the head band. FWIW, Luke Wilson said he was trying for a "lost Brian Wilson" look, but he didn't tell anyone back home in Dallas what he was doing it for, so he'd usually get these remarks like "so....I heard there's lots of drugs in Hollywood?"

I got only about a song and a half into Hey Clockface last year, after hearing some adoring praise (or maybe just fawning podcast interviews with him), before quitting.

I had a bootleg album "50,000,000 Elvis fans can't be wrong", great content but rough sound quality. Possibly my first record fair purchase (I really should have bought that pistols a&m single but I didn't have the £90)

Anyway, just recently I recompiled it from much improved online sources, including a complete "Hoover Factory"

I didn't think Hey Clockface was bad. Two of the advance "singles" for Hey Clockface, the title track and "Hetty O'Hara Confidential," felt like awful shit (or failed experiments to be kind) but the album surprisingly improved once I took those out. Without them, the whole thing turns into a cleanly bifurcated album with Side A focusing on the edgier, harder material and Side B showcasing his love for pre-rock pop ballads and torch songs. Side B is still an acquired taste but at least it's done well (much better than the dreadfully bland and dull North), and Side A wound up being pretty good.

I want to say he's consistently put out a good run of EP's over the last 15 years, each with four or five newly-recorded studio cuts that I really enjoy. Unfortunately they weren't released as EP's, they're all sunk into hour-long albums that don't extend that level of quality through the remaining tracks.

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

absolutely. I think Cruel was an alright album, pretty good, too long, but it was the last album by him I purchased and listened to a lot, and that was the last time I saw him. I wish he'd toured after this new one came out and not before, because I agree that this one is his best album since Painted by Memory. For one thing, Imposters are really sounding like the Attractions again (though I wish Nieve was a little higher in the mix).

I'm still listening to this thing, which uh I don't often do with any EC album as I age.

yeah me too. thanks for that review, it got me to give it a fair listen.

I need to give the new one The Boy Called If a fair listen too

Listened again last night, and as far as "Imposters are really sounding like the Attractions again" goes, I'd argue this is the first EC album full stop to sound (playing, production) like the Attractions since "Blood & Chocolate." I was listening last night and I forget which exact song it was but I kind of thought to myself, huh, this sounds like one of his early b-sides. Which might come off a backhanded compliment, but in Costello's case there's nothing backhanded about it at all.

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

Your problem is wanting to hear it on vinyl when you really should listen to it on an Apple watch speaker, the way it was meant to be heard.

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!