I wonder if the new Elvis Costello album is any good…
If you have to review a bad album, but you’re not the type of critic who actually tells readers that an album sucks, it’s convenient when you have some publicity talking-points at hand to vouchsafe to readers, which is what this writer spends most of the first three grafs of a six-graf review doing:
Verifiable news about “Momofuku” first surfaced on Mr. Costello’s Web site, elviscostello.com, the day of the album’s release on vinyl two weeks ago. (It comes out on CD this week.) The album started, Mr. Costello wrote in his post, when he contributed vocals to Jenny Lewis’s next record, which also included Davey Faragher, Mr. Costello’s regular bass player.
Mr. Costello then brought his drummer, Pete Thomas, into the picture and made his own record in a week, finishing the job less than three months ago. It involved a few other helpers, including Ms. Lewis, the singer-songwriter Johnathan Rice (Ms. Lewis’s boyfriend) and Mr. Thomas’s daughter Tennessee Thomas (also a drummer). Steve Nieve, another member of the Imposters, joined them on keyboards.
How … scintillating a tale! Still, there’s another three grafs to go. What to do? First, scramble around for something, anything, that can be quoted, lyricswise. Odds are they will be cringeworthy, but hey—it’s Elvis Costello, and if you say they display some of his “wit” and “ill-humor,” folks might just buy it, even if you realize they are actually rather lame. (“You can say anything you want to in your fetching cloak of anonymity/Are you feeling out of breath now, in your desperate pursuit of infamy?”)
Then, with the flop sweat about to hit, you reach for comparison to some earlier glories: “The Vox organ suffusing American Gangster Time,’ and its drum rhythm, recalls ‘Radio Radio,’ from Mr. Costello’s 1978 album ‘This Year’s Model’; the ‘In the Midnight Hour’ bass line in ‘Go Away’ sounds like something from ‘Get Happy!!’ from 1980.”
You don’t say the songs are as good as those classics, but the references make everyone involved feel good.
OK, we’re to the end now, but we’re worried about one last thing. Can we encode, somehow, obliquely, backhandedly, the fact that this isn’t a very good album?
How about a gnomic little aperçu that will float by most folks’ heads? How about:
It’s effortfully tossed off; it’s a middling record battling against his built-in high standards.
… And we finish with a reference to those “high Elvis Costello standards.” Those who pay attention know that those standards now consist largely of doing commercials for Lexus and putting out about 19 bad albums in a row, with nary a significant song among them. Hitsville hasn’t heard the new album, but would bet lunch that if there were a significant song on the new album, there would have been more in the review about that, and a little less about Jenny Lewis’s boyfriend’s drummer’s daughter.
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Yes, the NYTimes review was badly written. But this speculative semi-review isn’t much better. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt that the “19 bad albums in a row” crack is mere exaggeration for effect, unless you’re truly panning Imperial Bedroom, King Of America, Blood & Chocolate…
(Perhaps this is an example of your own “wit” and “ill-humor”? Glass houses, perhaps?)
But I’m assuming that your genuine assessment is that his recent work (When I Was Cruel, The Delivery Man, The River In Reverse) is sub-par (ie not enough “significant” songs). On this we differ. Costello is long past the point where he’s going to write “hits”, but I’d say that the title track for his album with Allen Toussaint was as significant as “Shipbuilding”, and maybe more so, just to cite one example.
I have actually listened to Momofuku– I’ve had it on vinyl since it came out two weeks ago– and I think it might be one of the most purely enjoyable records Costello has made. The very thing that the Times review seems to pounce upon as a central weakness– that it was written and recorded rather quickly– is, in my estimation, its greatest strength. It’s a fun record.
I don’t know if it passes your test with regards to “significant” songs (what exactly is your method of measuring such a thing? I’m genuinely curious.) But I don’t think there’s a single bad song on this album– at first, I wasn’t sure about “My Three Sons”, which is perhaps more openly sentimental than anything Costello has ever written, but it has grown on me. (It’s still probably my least favorite track on Momofuku.)
You may well hate the album. But you should definitely listen to it, if only to see whether or not you owe anybody a free lunch.
Thanks for taking the time to comment. I didn’t say it was badly written; the point is that you really can’t tell if it’s a good review or a bad review. Costello was once one of the great talents of our time; we all know he’s not an important recording artist any more, and most of us know that his recorded work lacks… well, a lot of things: urgency, memorable melodies, coherent lyrics, riffs, whatever.
But this is almost never said in reviews, which is why the writer (the name was left off the Times’ web site and I didn’t bother to look it up) spent the whole review talking about all that personnel folderol.
My own feelings about Costello are here.
[…] the album sucked because no one else did. I dissected the NYT’s comically generous take on it here. And Rolling Stone, in a typical formulation, hailed it as “Among his sharpest sets in […]