National Ransom - November 2010

[Fishfinger king]

One question : does it ever happen that an album, officially to be released on a Monday, appears in shops at the weekend before ?
I'm asking because a friend of mine currently living in UK is going to visit me next week, but he's got a plane on Sunday, 24th of October.
I wonder if there is any chance he could pick up National Ransom on Saturday ...

Never seen them in the shops early.

A couple of times CDs I've ordered online for Monday release have got to me on the Saturday - Magic by the Boss, as I recall, was one. Might be a bit much expecting this to, though!

But it wasn't too much to expect - arrived Saturday morning and listening now. Good on HMV.

[Ypsilanti]

On Facebook...

‎"Soon these secrets will be scattered
Heaven knows what lies inside
Took a lifetime to discover
A moment to decide"

Perhaps this is in reference to these mysterious "competitions", like the thing at Ronnie Scott's or the taping of Live From The Artist's Den...

I'd say this is a good day to watch the skies...

[Jack of All Parades]

Never a bad time to scan the heavens as our ancestors did but, as you have previously noted, may be very auspicious as tonight is the "full moon' with all the lyconthropic, or should I say 'lupetonian' attendant associations.

[And No Coffee Table]

I'm going to hazard that MPD might be the three Christian names of his son Matthew?

Yes... Matthew Patrick Declan, according to the King of America credits (where he's "sleeve consultant").

[wardo68]

I'm going to hazard that MPD might be the three Christian names of his son Matthew?

Yes... Matthew Patrick Declan, according to the King of America credits (where he's "sleeve consultant").

I figured it had to be something obvious. Thanks fellas!

[Deportee]

On first listen to the download, I'm loving it - a lot more immediate than Sugercane. The missus isn't a huge fan of EC but she says she's enjoying this album as well. With the ep it all fits nicely on to a cd at 76 mins.

[johnfoyle]

The Sunday Times
24 Oct. '10

Mark Edwards

Although Elvis Costello has wandered through genres with gay abandon, his songwriting talent and his voice lend themselves most naturally to just two: the pumped, R&B-tinged rock with which he made his name and the Americana with which he flirts. Last year's Secret, Profane & Sugarcane concentrated on the latter, but lacked good songs; National Ransom mixes both and is altogether more satisfying. Backed by members of the Sugarcanes and the Imposters, and calling on guest contributions from Marc Ribot, Buddy Miller and Leon Russell, the sound is occasionally too dense, but the classic Costelloid melody of Stations of the Cross, the Beatlesy inflections of Church Underground and the energetic title track lead a better collection of songs than we've had from the man for some time.

[johnfoyle]

Elvis' new album gets some space near the Corrs, Tower Records, Dublin.


Between Declan Nerney 'n Thin Lizzy re-issues - Elvis on sale in HMV, Grafton St.

[johnfoyle]

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-enter ... 15452.html


Simmy Richman, Independent On Sunday

24 October 2010

From Plant to John to Costello – what is it about singers of a certain age that makes them turn to T Bone Burnett (who, if he spreads himself any thinner, will have to change his name to Minute Steak)?

This is Costello in King of America mode: assorted players of calibre (Marc Ribot, Buddy Miller etc), 11 days in the studio and, presto, an album. It's a mixed bag, with nothing to trouble the anthologists and nothing to curl the toes. It proves that for all the genre-hopping, Costello's best is filed under unclassifiable.

[charliestumpy]

Our NR has just arrived from UK play.com, and we shall play/enjoy it, being disinclined to purchase superior audio vinyl/N.Ransack (whose tracks we all have).

We DO want to go to /frequently go to - Chelsea.

[blureu]

The man is now on foursquare. Oh goodness. Boggles the mind on where he will check-in.


http://foursquare.com/elviscostello

[johnfoyle]

http://news.scotsman.com/features/Album ... 6596676.jp

Album review: Elvis Costello, National Ransom

26 October 2010

By Fiona Shepherd, The Scotsman


FOR his 33rd album, Elvis Costello continues the Nashville love-in which commenced with last year's Secret, Profane & Sugarcane, a charming country collection which Costello now describes as a "range-finding shot". On National Ransom, he aims for so many targets that the cast of musicians has swollen into quite an impressive shooting party.

The Sugarcanes, his new band of country brothers, including singer/songwriter Jim Lauderdale and respected dobro/lap steel player Jerry Douglas, report for action, while his regular house band The Imposters are brought back into the fold. Vince Gill, Buddy Miller and Leon Russell drop by too.

The results were dispatched in 11 days with T Bone Burnett at the production helm. It is a testament to the talent of the ensemble that they can do justice to 16 songs in such a no-nonsense time frame. As a whole, National Ransom does feel a bit like a bespoke jam session, one where judicious attention has been given to who plays what where.

Costello's plan for the opening title track was to bring together a trio of diverse instrumentalists - Douglas, electric guitarist Marc Ribot and his trusty keyboard player Steve Nieve - as a portent of the appealing genre clash of the rest of the album.

This song alone is dense with internal rhymes, historical references and visual metaphors, and it dovetails with the sleeve illustration of a wolf running off with a bagful of burning cash. Its condemnation of Wall Street folly is, according to Costello, "for the bankrupt times, whenever they may be".

But National Ransom is more a collection of vignettes than the pursuit of a theme. Costello has envisaged historical and geographical settings for each song, which are noted in the lyrics booklet. To avoid being too prescriptive about the lyrics, they are intended as embellishing features rather than definitive meanings.

Some are personal. Dr Watson, I Presume (which is timestamped Wilkesboro, North Carolina - 2007) is a trad country ramble recounting Costello's first meeting a couple of years ago with country guitar legend Doc Watson.

Some are political. One Bell Ringing's postscript - the London Underground, 22 July 2005 - refers pointedly to the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes, and the song is a bleak yet poetic meditation on the violent snuffing out of a life, couched in mournful jazz woodwind and brass tones.

But National Ransom is also full of richly drawn fictional characters such as the forlorn Jimmie Rodgers tribute act touring the north of England in Jimmie Standing In The Rain.

http://www.heraldscotland.com/arts-ents ... -1.1063738

Making demands

Keith Bruce


26 Oct 2010

Elvis Costello is in New York City, which is hardly reason to chastise him, but it seems fair to point out that he hasn’t been to Scotland for, oh, several months.

At times recently it seemed that his name was permanently etched on the notional marquee over the entrance to Glasgow Royal Concert Hall as he made a succession of visits, in radically different guises, accompanied by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, the Brodsky String Quartet and then his own latest group of top American roots musicians, The Sugarcanes. Spoiled, we’ve been. But with a new album, National Ransom, to promote, when can we expect him next?

“You’re right, it’s some weeks since I’ve been in Scotland,” he laughs, and reels off each of the recent dates. What they illustrate, of course, is that Costello, individual as ever, works in his own way.

“Things don’t have to happen the way they used to: album, tour, T-shirt, videogame. There has to be more to life than that. I just do what works best for the music in different kinds of concerts. But I’ve no idea of the exact time.”

In fact five of the songs on the new album were additions to the repertoire of the Sugarcanes after the recording of the Secret, Profane, And Sugarcane collection. Another song he played then, Condemned Man, didn’t find a place on the new disc, which has some 16 new songs.

Costello is as prolific as he always was and busier than ever. He is in New York as part of an all-star line-up assembled by the producer of the new album, T-Bone Burnett. Burnett it was who revitalised Robert Plant’s career by teaming him with Alison Krauss on the Raising Sand album and who is about to perform a similar service for Elton John’s credibility with an album that teams him with US piano veteran Leon Russell. His charitable Speaking Clock Revue shows feature a rolling cast of new and rediscovered names combining their talents in the sort of fluid context that Costello – whose partnership with Burnett goes back to the 1980s – revels in.

Some of these associations inevitably crop up on National Ransom. My Lovely Jezebel is the fruit of a trip Costello made to the John/Russell sessions to find that Elton had departed for the day. In the remaining studio time, he and Burnett supplied lyrics to a tune that Russell composed.

“I first saw him in 1972 and he was fantastic then. If he’d gone anywhere, he’s back and he’s fantastic now. No-one plays piano like him. Some songs are on the album just for the mischief and pleasure of playing them. It would have been very claustrophobic otherwise. At one time I might have wanted to make that sort of record but not now.”

That sort of unbridled enthusiasm for music-making, and fan’s delight in working with people he has long admired, is a distinguishing Costello trait, but it sits alongside a compulsion to be the maverick outsider as well, an unwillingness to play the game by anyone else’s – and certainly the industry’s – rules.

National Ransom, he says, should be thought of as a double vinyl album, because that was what he was making. “I couldn’t say that out loud though, because they’d just try to charge more for it. So although it might suit you to have it as a CD or a download, it is two vinyl LPs. They can be a useful weapon,” he adds, enigmatically, “or a tray ...”

Of course the songs on National Ransom – performed by a whole troupe of recent and past Costello confederates as well as a guests including country star Vince Gill – carry their share of pointed messages. The Tony Millionaire illustration on the cover is a big hint as to the target of the title song: Wall Street’s “wolf at the window”, while the dating of One Bell Ringing to June 22, 2005 points to its concern with the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes on the London Underground. There is nothing, however, of the vitriol of a song like the Thatcher-despising Tramp the Dirt Down, from 1989’s Spike.

“To write a vitriolic song about a specific event, you’d need a degree of certainty,” explains Costello. “This is about the horror of someone’s life being taken. There is no assumption of moral authority. In the song National Ransom, I include myself among the guilty because of the interlocking nature of transactions now. But there is a tragic feeling of dread in the air.”

There is a consistency about this in Costello’s work, which makes his complaint that he is not competing with his past output reasonable.

“There was a cartoonish violence about Tramp the Dirt Down because Thatcher was a cartoonish figure. Shipbuilding [his timely co- composition with Clive Langer about the Falklands adventure] was not a protest song. There’s no black and white any more. There’s a moral certainty about protest music that is not attractive – and you are only listened to by people who agree with you.”

What is unarguable about the bulk of the new album is that it is a collection of compelling stories. Costello has recognised the narrative in most of the songs by putting a location and date at the end of each lyric, placing some of them specifically in hard times earlier last century.

“It wasn’t preconceived that way, it was just something I found myself doing. It occurred to me that many of the songs reflect on the moment we are moving through. The record was made in not a lot of time and you see what you end up with.”

In fact National Ransom’s total recording time of 11 days (in Nashville and Los Angeles) is the same time as Elvis Costello and the Attractions took to make This Year’s Model in 1978, with Nick “Basher” Lowe at the controls (“bash it down, and we’ll tart it up later”). There was no tarting up here though.

“There wasn’t a lot of tinkering. We played live in the studio, not to make any point just because that was a good way to do it. It makes the performance of it more joyful.”

That description masks a lot of skilful musical efficiency, however. The song You Hung the Moon (about a family’s way of coping with the killing of a First World War deserter) comes garlanded with a string arrangement concocted in the same timeframe. With no formal musical education, Costello has gone about acquiring all the skills that might be useful, as his book of charts for the RSNO showed.

“I now have the confidence to write what it is I want to hear,” he concedes, “but I had to do it on the fly. I wanted that to sound like a little band show on the radio – and that’s what you get.”

That nostalgic feeling permeates the new album, a fact underlined by the fact that Costello has also made National Ransom available as a collectable set of 78rpm discs. In a sense he is putting a marker down.

“We are heading for a transition and it might be that we don’t make record albums any more. I’ve no way of knowing. But they were beautiful and they sound good, and we’ll have lost a bit of that. And we’ve still got 100 years of music to listen to and enjoy.”

[cwr]

It's refreshing to see some unambiguously positive reviews of National Ransom-- it seems like the Lazy Take on the album is that it's somehow too much of a good thing.

One could easily say the same thing about Get Happy!! or IbMePdErRoIoAmL. I think Costello is, to a certain extent, cursed by never having had a run of lousy albums. He's had periods where he does unexpected things that generate a mixed response-- like North, Painted From Memory, or The Juliet Letters-- but he's never had a period equivalent to Dylan in the 80s or much of McCartney's post-Wings output. Costello's never really had a period where there was a consensus that he was coasting or that he had forgotten how to write songs or make good records.

As a result, he's never really had the trajectory to establish a Comeback Narrative. He's never had his Time Out Of Mind moment, where he was gone and now he's BACK. The closest he came was when he took a few years off between Painted From Memory (1998) and When I Was Cruel (2002). It had been six years since EC had put out a non-Bacharach album of songs, and it created enough of a pent-up desire that WIWC probably ended up being overpraised as a GREAT album when it was actually only a really fun GOOD album. (I was as guilty of that as anyone. I still enjoy it, but it is more of a fun second-tier Costello record than one of his true greats.)

National Ransom deserves to have that full force praise. But unfortunately, it comes on the heels of a run of really good albums, and I think there is a lazy tendency for critics to say, "Yes, we get it. Another collection of really good songs by Elvis Costello. We GET it. 16 songs? Oh, that's so many. I guess that will be the thing we find fault with." Whereas if EC took ten years off and didn't record any new songs and maybe had a health scare or survived a bad car accident, they would feel more comfortable just calling the new album great.

You can be fairly sure that if Dylan wrote 16 songs of this caliber, he'd get almost nothing but praise. Costello may be a critical darling, but none of his albums in the last 15 years have received the kind of across-the-board rapturous acclaim that met, say, Dylan's Modern Times. Even his well-reviewed records always get a fair amount of pans or positive reviews that feel the need to qualify their praise the way many of the NR reviews do...

[jardine]

i think this is exactly right, that weird qualified praise. seems to be sometimes of a piece with the genre hopping, angry guy, knee (shall we say?) jerks. when i look at things like north, pfm, delivery, just to name three, they really are quite spectacular, beautiful accomplishments, as is national ransom.

any thoughts on what rolling stone might say, perhaps later today in their online album reviews? they gave leon and elton 5 out of 5, and nearly the same, i think, to the secret sisters. might be a t-bone fetish (please warn children not to google this phrase).

[migdd]

In their print edition, Rolling Stone gave NR 3 1/2 stars and dismissed it in a very short paragraph. It was a positive review of what could have been any EC album, emphasizing the "angry" aspects of the new record. Rolling Stone is determined to keep Elvis in some kind of iconic 1979 time capsule.

[cwr]

For all his reputation as a critical darling, Costello gets a LOT of reviews that sound like that RS review-- tepid boilerplate with enough praise to show that they "get" that Costello is talented, but with enough reservations to show that they're used to it by now. File under: Vaguely Cynical and Lazy.

Again, a lot of this is context. If EC were to make 4 shitty albums in a row and THEN release a National Ransom, it would get 5-star reviews all around. The problem is that there's nothing surprising about a 5-star album following on the heels of multiple 4-star albums in a row.

[jardine]

i hate to even venture this out loud, but i do really believe that elvis is too "something" for a lot of people, including a lot of critics, to understand or to like immediately and quickly and passively. his work always requires something of me, some effort that always, to varying degrees, pays off for the effort. and the better his work is, the more work it asks of me, and the more willing i am to take that time and effor. if you give something to his work, you'll get something wonderful in return, and if you don't or won't or can't, its quality won't appear. . . he'll just remain the formerly-angry guy, or the genre hopper, just wordy or pretentious or whatever. or a friend of mine will repeatedly talk about long melody lines that are hard for him to follow even though he's never worked at it when he faces this problem, just "attributed" it to Elvis' wanderings.

since his first album, i've listened over and over and allowed it to grow and myself to grow with it. and with many of them, that first listen is a "jar" that makes me think "wait a minute. What???" and i realize that i need to "go" somewhere and do something, practice something, if i'm going to meet him halfway. even though it varies greatly over his career, he's rarely failed me in this effort.

[johnfoyle]

http://www.spinner.com/2010/10/26/elvis ... bluegrass/

Elvis Costello to Music Critics: 'National Ransom' Is Not a Bluegrass Record

Oct 26th 2010

by Jenny Charlesworth

The release of 'National Ransom' is a celebratory occasion for Elvis Costello, but the bespectacked Brit s also feeling a tad "bewildered" about the whole affair.

Costello has no reason to doubt the allegiance of his longtime fans when it comes to snapping up his latest album when it's released this week. Nor is the musical maven second-guessing the lively album art; the greedy fox making off with a satchel of greenbacks is perfectly on point.

So what's causing Costello's consternation? He's shocked by music critics en masse describing 'National Ransom.' as "bluegrass."

"It must be said by people who have never heard any bluegrass before," Costello tells Spinner. "When people are looking for a shortened way to describe things, they hear a fiddle and dobro and a mandolin -- and those instruments are common to bluegrass -- so they assume that's what you're doing."

"I mean, certainly the last record [2009's 'Secret, Profane & Sugarcane'] was predominately a string band record," he continues, trying to rationalize how the incorrect genre descriptor came about. "There actually weren't very many bluegrass songs on that record either, though. They were mostly my compositions, a couple of co-compositions and a Bing Crosby song -- Bing Crosby wasn't famous for doing any bluegrass music either, you know?"

When it comes to sonic touchstones on the T. Bone Brunett-produced disc, Costello is all too happy set the record straight.

"I don't think you'll get in any arguments for the fact that rhythms on this record -- things like 'The Spell That You Cast' and 'Stations of the Cross,' which is a very sort of serious and emotional song, and 'Church Underground' -- have more to do with R&B and gospel music than they ever had to do with bluegrass," he says. "Where you get the musical root from is not really so important as what you do with it when you get it."

"I don't want anybody to sort of buy this record thinking they're going to hear some hot bluegrass played," he adds. "They should buy a Ralph Stanley record. But if they want to hear my songs, played with these great musicians who have played all sorts of different music -- people like Stuart Duncan can break your heart with one phrase of the fiddle, play pure and absolutely the best tone you can imagine, but he's also not afraid to put his fiddle through a fuzzbox, if that's what's needed -- then great."

Costello takes every opportunity to sing the praise of Duncan and the other players who helped bring his latest opus to life. Given his awe-inspiring discography, the singer-songwriter has every right to spend hours rattling off his own personal achievements on this record, and others, but prefers to discuss group dynamics and make clear that the musicians attached to 'National Ransom' are his colleagues, not hired hands.

"I had all these great musicians," he says, "and I knew the songs I had were tall tales I wanted to tell -- they felt like something to me -- and I just wanted to see what happened when we combined these things, and I believe some magic happened."

"I don't really set myself objectives [going into the studio]," he adds. "It makes me sound like a general with a map, pushing little models of tanks and banjos and guitars..."

Costello admits taking that leap of faith would have been much harder had there been less seasoned musicians in the studio, which would have robbed the disc of some of his most cherished parts.

"If you know what you want to hear, then, of course you don't get that great surprise, that beautiful expressive response to something you've sung that you couldn't have written down and you couldn't have allowed for," says Costello. "It's something surprising that's thrilling like Marc [Ribot]'s guitar on 'National Ransom' or [guitarist] Jerry Douglas' lines on 'That's Not the Part of Him You're Leaving,' or the fiddle on 'Dr. Watson, ', you know?

"There's things that stick in my mind when I hear the record that I never could have asked them to do -- they had to feel it, and then play it."

[johnfoyle]

Elvis will be lovin' this view from Dubai-

http://dubai92.com/music/the-tom-dan-re ... al-ransom/

[jardine]

you know, it really is a shame when you think of how carefully and beautifully elvis can speak about music, composition, history, players, writers, that he is asked to spend his time in so many instances answering questions like "is this bluegrass?" if this was a REAL question that actually wanted to explore what that means, and elvis was allowed to tell us about all the lovely stuff he's found, all the songwriters (some recently deceased) whose work he knows so well--but instead "what do you say to people who say you hop genres?"

it is terrible to think how good those interviews could be, how much we could enjoy following all those threads, how much our listening and lives could be opened up...

i guess it is also my own fault for expecting something that has never really happened much anyway in the popular press. no wonder he seemed to interview himself with odile stuff. i just hope/expect that elvis knows that there are real. thoughtful, intelligence, inquisitive fans, of him and of music, and i expect this forum could give him an interview that he himself, as a creative and knowledgeable person, would enjoy

[cwr]

My gift to lazy music reviewers:
Costello's Aim Still True On New Bluegrass Record, But Marred By Too Many Good Songs

No charge.

[EarlManchester]

My gift to lazy music reviewers:
Costello's Aim Still True On New Bluegrass Record, But Marred By Too Many Good Songs

No charge.

Wow -- 1400 hits on google for the phrase "Costello's Aim Still True"...

[jardine]

get happy!!! you can trust that this year's model's aim is true but still angry.

ok, come on folks, we can do this!!!

[Jeremy Dylan]

get happy!!! you can trust that this year's model's aim is true but still angry King of Americana deliver's an imperial and forceful mixed bag.

How's that?



I'm almost as sick as EC must be of this line of thinking. I mean, for Christ's sake, he's not Johnny Rotten. This album is probably less country than MY AIM IS TRUE. There must be some book of Critical Shorthand somewhere with an entry reading:

E. COSTELLO
70s punk singer - three good albums, after which became a schizophrenic and mellowed out.

And that's the basis for comparison that most people are using. It's akin to if reviews of the new Dylan album went like this:

BOB DYLAN - TOGETHER THROUGH LIFE (** 1/2)
Bob Dylan, whose classic folk albums in the earlier 60s, gave a fiery fuel to the civil rights movement, is back with another late period album. This time around, he eschews his classic solo guitar playing and instead has an electric band accompanying him. The results are mixed. While the songs are all very good, they aren't the venomous protest numbers that made Dylan so formidable in the day. Instead, he seems to go for esoteric, indirect couplets that often make little logical sense. Better luck next time, Bob.

[verbal gymnastics]

How come nobody has said the new album is Almost Bluegrass?