REVIEWS: National Ransom

[Top balcony]

a great album -I don't think so, not by a long chalk !
In fact i think the 4 cuts on National Ransack are superior to a number of tracks on NR

Still listening generously, so haven't yet decided where to put it on my personal league table. However my initial-ish reaction is to agree that it's not consistently fantastic. There are some terrific songs but also some not at the same level, perhaps they will reward repeated listens . Nevertheless can't understand how Condemned Man has been confined to the EP, to these aged ears it's up there with his very best compositions.

Think we may have been spoiled by the quality of the live shows, both solo and with the 'Canes. The songs we've heard already via the Taping Community ( take a bow all you lapel and sunglasses merchants) seem a bit flat in comparison to the live takes.

Colin Top Balcony

[jardine]

http://www.metacritic.com/music/national-ransom

collects quite a few already cited

[cwr]

Think we may have been spoiled by the quality of the live shows, both solo and with the 'Canes. The songs we've heard already via the Taping Community ( take a bow all you lapel and sunglasses merchants) seem a bit flat in comparison to the live takes.

It's funny, because I feel the exact opposite-- I was underwhelmed by most of the live recordings I'd heard, and was sort of bracing myself for a slight letdown. Personally, I think that this is such a wonderfully recorded album-- the performances and the sounds are just so terrific, I feel like they really captured something special here. A song like "Bullets For The New-Born King" felt flat to me when I was listening to a live recording of it, but the NR version is thrilling to me. Same with "Dr. Watson, I Presume" and "The Part Of Him You're Leaving"-- I felt like it was going to be a very dull, very worthy-sounding record. Instead, I think it's a crackerjack from start to finish.

[Ypsilanti]

It's funny, because I feel the exact opposite-- I was underwhelmed by most of the live recordings I'd heard, and was sort of bracing myself for a slight letdown. Personally, I think that this is such a wonderfully recorded album-- the performances and the sounds are just so terrific, I feel like they really captured something special here. A song like "Bullets For The New-Born King" felt flat to me when I was listening to a live recording of it, but the NR version is thrilling to me. Same with "Dr. Watson, I Presume" and "The Part Of Him You're Leaving"-- I felt like it was going to be a very dull, very worthy-sounding record. Instead, I think it's a crackerjack from start to finish.

Absolutely agree with you, CWR! Totally, totally.

[the_platypus]

This is a great album, no doubt about it in my mind.

[spooky girlfriend]

Paste magazine has one of my fave reviews so far:

By Bonnie Stiernberg
Elvis can’t pick a genre, but we don’t care

There aren’t too many artists who can make an album that features both vaudeville and bluegrass sounds and get away with it. At this point in his career, Elvis Costello has dabbled in every genre under the sun, and on National Ransom, his second collaboration with T Bone Burnett in as many years, he gives us a little bit of everything. On paper, it should be a disaster, but Costello’s stellar songwriting saves the project and makes it worth delving into.

The album’s disjointedness comes in part from its dense concept: Each song is assigned a specific time and place for a setting, ranging from “A Drawing Room in Pimlico, London, 1919” or “Somewhere in South America, 1951” to “On a Narrow Bed. Some Other Time.” The time-travel motif loosely ties the disparate songs that are strong enough to stand on their own.

More than anything, National Ransom reveals that Costello is still a powerhouse writer. Whether he’s offering beautifully rich character portraits (the Tin Pan Alley-inspired “Jimmie Standing in the Rain”) or some of the clever wordplay fans have come to expect from him (lines like “bells and hands were only there for wringing” and “using his clause just like a practiced fingersmith”), it’s clear that after three decades he can still pen a hell of a tune.

Nowhere is this more apparent than on “That’s Not the Part of Him You’re Leaving,” just the kind of cutting country song about heartbreak you’d imagine playing from the jukebox during last call at a lonely, dive bar. It’s no coincidence that the song with one of the vaguest settings (“On the Road Between Dismal and Discouraged. Right Now”) is also the record’s best.

National Ransom may not be his most cohesive work, but it’s certainly another solid collection of compelling songs. At one point Costello sings, “Nobody wants to buy a counterfeited prairie lullaby in a coillery town,” and he’s right — it sure is a big leap from New Wave to bluegrass. But Elvis never sounds inauthentic. His album may suffer from multiple personality disorder, but when each new persona is such a pleasure, we’re in no hurry to call in the psychiatrist.

[jardine]

agree, too, cwr. i almost always find the live recordings so muddy sounding and echo-y that i can really get a clear sense of the shape of the songs much of the time.

church underground
jimmie
you hung the moon
voice in the dark
josephine
all these strangers
one bell ringing
bullets
stations
dr. watson

that's ten of sixteen i'd put as first rate. i really have always been interested in "recordings," not just the song as a taped performance. arrangements, the mixes, the often studio-created sound of the thing.

so even with the songs not on the above list, i love the crackling sound of 5 small words, that huge reverb guitar in the center "channel," and my own speculations about whether that is the fender. some songs are a bit throwaway, like "spell," but even there, i love listening to it as a toss off, great hooks, great turn at "I don't think i can take it. ., " plus the unmistakable Vox Continential that i've loved/hated since summer '66 and ? and the mysterians. so even with comparatively throw away stuff, it sounds wonderful or has interesting bits or turns that keep my attention perked and interested and wanting to hear that again...what was that?

[bambooneedle]

I bought it today.

What strikes me most is the mix. This is rock, country, jazz, and pop all in the same music. There's respect back to the Thirties...it's not Cab Calloway or Woody Guthrie or the Mitchell Brothers, but a song about chicken would fit right in.

The dissonance in it is almost a seed. It feels like he's captured all the genres, and slapped them together to make a monster. It isn't clean or slick, it's real and unkempt, yet deceptively sophisticated.

In the prescence of all these sounds of days of eighty years ago, he jams in some modern jazz sounds from only fifty or forty years ago. All this with a country flair, and here and there a bit of Painted from Memory.

What is happening here is Elvis on the verge of creating a new form. He needs to take the fiddle and double bass, grab some saxophone and oboe, and get the Hell out of Nashville. He's at the edge of something great, musically.

Earth knows we could use a new form. Rock is dead, jazz smells funny, and country sucks. Elvis is our only hope of giving us something new to live for. He needs to start hanging out with Eno and Beck...he needs to finish what Miles Davis and Thelonius Monk started.

Music needs a saviour. Nailing Elvis to the cross won't help. Nudging Elvis over the precupice of a New Day is the real ticket.

Chicken ain't nothin' but a word.

I don't know ARL -- I'm excited about this new album too - what I've listened to properly so far is very impressive. I already like it more than the last Dylan, Springsteen, Mellencamp, Waits albums --
but speaking of chicken "fried chicken!" was an expression Queen used at the end of the operatic and hugely anthemic hit of theirs One Vision as if to turn its importance on its head. EC sounds masterful and at ease as he captures your imagination weaving amazing cinematic images, luring you in with his confidential voice, hypnotizing you with the carefully studied charm, studiously observed and internalized. But if Elvis may be on the verge a new big leap, it's for him I suspect; it has all been done before (Freddie Mercury could have done Slow Drag) and he knows that his talents are to (and thankfully) reach only the interested.

Elvis' ambitions for success have been satisfied in recent years. With Spectacle, playing for Obama, etc, how much more recognition could he want? As a fan I think a large part of him needs to be seen to be successful outwardly (which he is being), and other than that to just enjoy what he's doing (which he definitely is). And a father of two four year olds, he is looking very fit and content at the moment.

I too would like to see him work with Eno and people like that. I think Elvis needs to pick up where he left off with When I Was Cruel, now with the wisdom acquired with the goth of The Delivery Man, the melancholy of New Orleans, the roots and showbiz of Sugarcane and Ransom going backwards through the decades, combined with elements of the TYM-B&C-BY-WIWC lineage...that, could be his crowning masterpiece.

[Jack of All Parades]

I want it clear and emphatic up front-"National Ransom" is a very good record, one that holds my interest after repeated listening. Like some others, it is my favorite album from EC since "Painted From Memory" and the only one from the past decade outside of "North" that I think will offer memorable songs for generations to come. With five songs that show a master's touch-"Jimmie Standing in the Rain", "You Hung the Moon", "Five Small Words", "That's Not the Part of Him You're Leaving" and "A Voice in the Dark"- that makes a quotient that marks a solid effort for me. The rest of the songs have faults or are trifles but there are none that I would out right dismiss.

I appreciate how EC has steeped this album in history, juxtaposing the hard times people face today with equivalent musical examples from other generations which only helps to reinforce the pain, suffering, the unstable lives people are living today. We have been there before. That he reinforces that history with melodic examples from older song genres is quite appropriate. It adds a texture to my appreciation of the individual songs. This album makes tasteful usage of musical sounds and instruments and playing from various eras that shades and colors individual songs-many of these effects have been duly noted in other comments on this thread. I, in particular, note EC's acquired guitar skills and the exuberance that musicians like Buddy Miller, Marc Ribot, Steve Nieve and Dennis Crouch bring to the songs they augment. The music is consistently alive on this record with the intelligent playing by the assembled musicians.

I like that EC is angry again and that the anger inhabits the music and lyrics. You and I, and even EC, are to blame for the mess that is spelled out in the title song. We have succumbed to the greed and false vision of prosperity around us whether it is taking on individual debt loads we cannot handle, looking for easy 'paper profits' or looking to place our money with advisers who promise outlandish returns with little risk. The pain and psychological angst that we feel today as we are outsourced, marginalized, diminished, 'forgotten' is palpable in songs like "Jimmie", "Bullets" and "Church". Former refuges for comfort like religion in "Church" are discredited. Despair, chaos and desperation, as portrayed in "Stations", is the norm. Governments are not to be counted upon or trusted as evidenced in "Bullets" The images of rising water, the foreboding of mistrust, the 'cinematic' repeating of noir images, like fighters, gun mauls and gangsters populate the stanzas- you are on your own and the best you can hope for is a pair of loving arms to rest within, but do not count on that witness "All These Strangers". The capper of a "Voice In the Dark" is poignant. Perhaps simple in notion, the sense that we can retain some dignity, some sense of community through song, echoes joyfully the same notion that is played with in the song with the pennies that rain down, though not on some, as they did in Arlen's great tune from the thirties. Just as music was charged with energizing people then, EC strikes a comparable theme in this tune.

What has me most excited about this record is that he is alive to words and rhyme again. The examples are too numerous and each listener should have the fun of discovering for himself as the songs play without having them pointed out by me. They definitely are there, though. He has rediscovered a clean line and his stanzas are filled with clever and unforced word play. As others have noted his singing, outside of "Church", is modulated, engaged and full of a warmth and expressiveness that has been sorely missing for years. This record is a frightening record for today couched in older styles of melody and playing. EC has picked up on the fear, anger and hurt that permeates our present lives and his individual songs are made to reflect our era's nightsweats and hallucinations with appropriate lurid, sad and tawdry shadings. These songs move along as often powerfully funny, cinematique spurts of writing that are swift, ironic and witty comments with historical resonance. I continue to play it and that is my best endorsement. I see no dust gathering on its sleeve in the years to come.

[pophead2k]

I'll concur with most of the others after a week's listening- this is a corker from top to bottom. I'm one of those fans who enjoys the melodic EC over the 'rowdy' EC most of the time, and so my initial reaction to 'National Ransom', 'Five Small Words', 'Jezebel', etc. was muted. However, I'm finding with repeated listening I'm enjoying them more and more. I definitely love 'Josephine', 'I Lost You', 'Church Underground', 'Jimmie', 'Bullets', and 'Voice'. Probably least inspired by 'One Bell Ringing', although I appreciate the subject matter. I have a feeling I'll keep this one heavy rotation longer than the last couple, although I'm a fan of them as well.