Review: Elvis Costello | National Ransom

Hear Music (2010)
By ZETH LUNDY  |  October 26, 2010
3.0 3.0 Stars

 102910_OTRElvis_main

Back in the late '70s and early '80s, Elvis Costello would plot his cosmic knowledge of music history into his own songs, as if they were booty for like-minded music geeks. These days, he wears his influences on his sleeve, whether they're classical, jazz, or country. (I mean, dude gets in character like Miles Davis, with a fashion sense that matches each stylistic whim.) He recently donned the hat of Depression-era Americana troubadour with a pair of back-to-back albums produced by fellow enthusiast T Bone Burnett — the same guy who helmed Costello's first foray into American roots, 1986's King of America.

National Ransom expands the acoustic canvas of last year's Secret, Profane & Sugarcane with both electric and eclectic instrumentation, getting support from the likes of Marc Ribot, Jerry Douglas, Vince Gill, Buddy Miller, and Leon Russell. Here, Costello mixes minor-key rags ("Jimmie Standing in the Rain"), skippy ditties ("A Slow Drag with Josephine"), country-tinged rock ("National Ransom," "Five Small Words"), and Sun-Records-via-new-wave gumbo (the propulsive deep track "The Spell That You Cast"), all with a novelist's sense of detail.

Like many of his new-century records, National Ransom is half awesome and half meh — at 16 tracks, it's a little too long, and ballads like "You Hung the Moon," though subversive and clever, accentuate his increasingly overbearing vocal tics. Still, Costello appears to be back on the Coherent Melody bandwagon (his long-winded, hyper-intelligent melodic sense is in short supply), and he remains, from time to time, downright transfixing. National Ransom isn't the midlife masterpiece that obsessives have been pining for, but its finer points are worth seeking out, in all their sepia-tinted glory.

Related: Photos: Elvis Costello + Head & the Heart at the Newport Folk Festival, Elvis Costello | Secret, Profane and Sugarcane, Photos: Brand New at House of Blues, More more >
  Topics: CD Reviews , Entertainment, Music, Elvis Costello,  More more >
| More


Most Popular
ARTICLES BY ZETH LUNDY
Share this entry with Delicious
  •   R.E.M. | DOCUMENT [25TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION]  |  September 19, 2012
    Fans of R.E.M. enjoy arguing over which album was the band's true shark-jump, but 1987's Document was inarguably the end of a groundbreaking era.
  •   RICHARD HAWLEY | STANDING AT THE SKY'S EDGE  |  September 04, 2012
    Richard Hawley's seventh studio album opens with "She Brings the Sunlight," a clouds-parting, hippy-dippy drone explosion that plays like "Tomorrow Never Knows" caught in the echo of a football stadium.
  •   BOB MOULD | SILVER AGE  |  August 28, 2012
    Now that he's getting love as a godfather figure from both sides of the indie/mainstream divide (see No Age and Foo Fighters, for starters), Bob Mould is again playing like he has something to prove — or at least an iconography to maintain.
  •   RY COODER | ELECTION SPECIAL  |  August 14, 2012
    Ry Cooder's spur-of-the-moment (or is it heat-of-the-moment?) political album opens like any good political album should, with a rollicking blues song told from the point of view of Mitt Romney's dog.
  •   ANTIBALAS | ANTIBALAS  |  August 13, 2012
    As its simple title would suggest, the fifth album from the Brooklyn Afrobeat torchbearers gets back to basics.

 See all articles by: ZETH LUNDY