New album for 2013: "Wise Up Ghost" (with The Roots!)

Pretty self-explanatory
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jardine
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Re: New album for 2013: "Wise Up Ghost" (with The Roots!)

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"Again, without claiming to have carefully dissected these lyrics, I've never felt so strongly EC's basic disappointment in the world's inability to hold anything sacred. There's a kind of sad, empathetic wisdom that runs through this album...the critique is still there but the bile and sarcasm have been left behind, in favour of a compassion that feels as deep as anything he's ever done. Early days, but I rate "Tripwire" as one of his finest moments for just this reason." (sorry, the quote function frightens me. [i'd put a smile icon here, but well, that too...]).

Yes, this is a really good description, sad, empathic wisdom...and the depth of feeling on that Jimmy Fallon version of Tripwire is ...well, one of the vest vocals he's done, I think, especially at the 4 minute mark where he pleads up a octave. Someone also mention how much of the singing is down in such a rich, warm, unstrained range-- that adds to the sense of sadness and empathy, and like you said so well, outrage "without bile and sarcarsm." Why I'm thinking more and more along those lines that have been expressed in this thread--I feel it too. THIS is the guy I fell for years ago, come back around with the fullness of age. He seems to be inhabiting what he's doing in a way that is, well, wonderful and audible and welcome. Some sort of "distance" has been breached.

I really love this album and its surroundings...might be puppy love (I always tend to fall hard early on with certain music)...we'll see how it ages. I'm looking forward to seeing what happens as the weeks pass, the lyrics arrive, and the thing becomes familiar.

But let me said it outright: thanks, Elvis, once again. One way or another, this is a lovely thing you've loosed on the world, so much power, so much pleasure in the making, so hard to listen to and face the difficult images cascading by. To paraphrase Blaise Cendrars comment on hearing Ellington for the first time (in the Beyond Category book)...not just new music but a new reason for living.
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Re: New album for 2013: "Wise Up Ghost" (with The Roots!)

Post by John »

Just appeared on The Guardian's website

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/s ... -too-funky

Elvis Costello and the Roots: 'There's no such thing as too funky'

The English songwriter and Questlove of the Roots are an unlikely musical pairing, but their new album combines rock and hip-hop to dreamy and groove-filled effect.

It is a humid mid-September morning in New York City that will later produce thunderstorms of biblical force, but neither Elvis Costello nor his sparring partner Ahmir Thompson are dressed for the weather. In fact, while on first sight this coupling might strike you as odd, the pair of them are dressed remarkably similarly: Costello in black jeans and a grey jacket and waistcoat, Questlove, as the latter is more commonly known, pairing his black jeans with a grey cardigan. There's an easy familiarity between them, despite their 17-year age gap and despite Quest's fear of freaking out Costello the first few times they met.

"Often in the past I've had mixed results with meeting my heroes," he says, describing a tendency to lay on the fanboy element to a bunny-boiler extent. "I know from my own experience that it's better just to engage people with normalcy …"

"David Cross" – the US comedian – "was talking to me about exactly this last night," Costello interrupts. "It's a story he tells in his act, how he met me when he was 18. I'm trying to figure out roughly how old is he, how far back into me being a bastard is this?" (Seeing Costello so jovial today, it's a stretch to remember that this is the singer who once replied to a masseuse who told him: "You're all wound up, relax" with the admonition: "It's my job to get wound up".)

"I was lurking backstage at a Clash gig on the West Side [in New York] and he tried to engage me in conversation. I wasn't out-and-out rude to him, but clearly whatever he said didn't impress me – and it was mortifying for him. So I told him: it was just the same for me – because Allen Ginsberg was at that gig, because he wanted to meet the Clash, and I could barely open my mouth to speak to him. 'It's Allen Ginsberg!' And so it goes … I've been in so many situations like that where you want to say the wittiest thing and you end up sounding completely idiotic."

"I did that once to Prince," replies Questlove. "I chose a real obscure cut and said: 'Dinner with Dolores has the best ending and fade in postmodern black pop history!" Prince was just like: 'Okaaay …'"

Costello picks up the story, telling the tale of his own faltering relationship with Prince, which began with him asking for permission to quote the lyrics from Pop Life in his song The Bridge I Burned, and getting two cease-and-desist letters from lawyers in Minneapolis by way of reply, before they finally met at a function for Barbra Streisand ("although we only communicated in sign language").

If nothing else, there was an inevitability to the pairing of Costello and Questlove's band the Roots in making the hugely well reviewed Wise Up Ghost because each party could lay claim to being the best musically connected act in town. The former has collaborated with everyone from Burt Bacharach to Anne Sofie von Otter, while the Roots have redefined their reputation as torch bearers for hip-hop's conscience through their ongoing stint as the house band on US talkshow Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, where they have performed with a Who's Who of guests.

In 2009, Costello was a guest on the show., in order to promote his own music-based TV talkshow, Spectacle, but was between records – or more accurately, was "wondering if making records was still a suitable occupation for me. I love writing songs and recording but ... am I being selfish in terms of my life with my young family?" (With his third wife, Diana Krall, he has young twin sons.) Lacking a new song, he left it to the Roots to pick a song to perform with him on Fallon; as well as Watching the Detectives, Questlove and Roots producer Steven Mandel – secret "Elvis freaks" – dug out a real obscurity. "It was High Fidelity," Costello recalls, "but not the [1980] single version; it came from a bootleg that we put out on some reissue. We thought we were David Bowie doing Station to Station when I wrote it, but I couldn't carry that off with the Attractions because we didn't have [guitarist] Carlos Alomar or Eno – we just had Nick Lowe, a lot of blue pills and vodka, so we played it really fast. But the bootleg version did have, that one time, this Chic-influenced funk thing going on – and the Roots went back to that."

It wasn't just that: when Costello appeared on stage for the peformance on Fallon, Questlove picked as his walk-on music a jingle known to generations of Britons and fans with "a PhD in Elvis-ology" alike: Secret Lemonade Drinker, the song that made the famous ad for R White's Lemonade, performed by Costello's father, the showband singer Ross McManus, with backing vocals from McManus Jr. "The only funnier thing than that was when Bob Dylan played my dad's ska record from the 60s on his Theme Time radio show," Costello adds, lapsing into a passable Dylan impression.

Like Costello, Questlove has a musical heritage – his father was Lee Andrews of Lee Andrews & the Hearts, a 50s doo-wop group. "I know a lot of singers who have fathers who were ministers or pastors or deacons. We call them 'PKs', for preacher kids, and I often see them bonding. But I'd never bonded with a fellow 'BK': a backstage kid," the drummer says. "I thought I was the only one. But no, Elvis and I have the same sort of upbringings."

Both their mothers were big music fans, too: Questlove's performed with her husband as part of Philadelphia soul group Congress Alley, while Costello's mum sold records at Rushworth's in Liverpool. "She was hired because she knew about jazz. It's amazing to me now, how she even knew about people like Lee Konitz – which is how I ended up playing with him years later. That's how my dad met her: he went into the shop to buy records."

"That's awesome!" Questlove says.

Raised a generation apart on different sides of the Atlantic, both parties adopted similar tactics in their formative years, too. Costello secured his first US record deal after he was arrested busking outside a CBS Records convention in London in 1977, an episode once identified as one of the 15 boldest publicity stunts in music history, while the Roots – as Questlove also elucidates in his recently published memoir Mo' Meta Blues – really found themselves musically through months spent playing live on the streets of Philadelphia.

"We did that all through the summer of 1992," he says. "There was no precedent for what we were. There wasn't a live hip-hop band in Philly or on the eastern seaboard. That element opened up the minds of people who would normally say no to traditional hip-hop acts. It was a good thing and a bad thing. People would be like: 'I don't like rap music too much, but I like you guys, because you're real musicians.' There'd be a few times in the very beginning when our agent had to sell us like: 'They're a jazzy, kind of poetry, funky band who … [quickly sotto voce] do a little hip-hop.'

"It's so weird," he continues. "Every time we reach some kind of milestone in our career, like playing at the White House or at the Grammys, I tell Tariq [AKA Black Thought, the group's MC]: 'Do you remember when we started out, busking on the streets just to get $20 each to get a turkey sandwich and take a girl to a movie? Don't you miss those days?' And he's always like: 'Hell, no! I don't miss those days!'"

Costello guffaws: "Glad to hear it!"

Fighting shy of compromise, both Costello and the Roots have effected the transition from unlikely outsiders to fully fledged members of the musical establishment, even though both parties have endured career vicissitudes. One case in point: the Roots are finally signed to Def Jam now, that most iconic hip-hop label, but Costello beat them to the punch, releasing When I Was Cruel, his 19th album, through that same imprint in the aftermath of a messy industry shakeup in 2002. (Costello: "So that explains everything!"; Wise Up Ghost arrives through a one-off deal with Blue Note, in whose mildly dilapidated offices in midtown this interview takes place.) This decade, however, Costello has performed Penny Lane in front of Paul McCartney and Barack Obama at the White House, while on Fallon, the Roots have played with the president.

In the week that we meet, Syria is dominating the news and, given the Roots's socially conscious track record on albums such as Game Theory, I ask Questlove for his view on whether Obama is twisting in the wind in the face of the crisis. In response he's equivocal: "What's the question? What do I feel about war? There's two ways to look at it …" Which lets Costello leap back into the conversation to support him, articulating the complications of the situation so deftly that suddenly he's on to the topic of Joe Kennedy's support of appeasement in the 30s and Churchill's ambiguous status as a hero. "It goes on … it's hard to be exactly right."

The themes explored on Wise Up Ghost are urgent and political, and not simply in the best tradition of Costello classics such as Pills and Soap and Shipbuilding: rather, throughout the album, the singer reappropriates lines from his earlier songs, recontextualising them with new lyrics as well as new music, which tends towards a dreamlike, unsettling quality. It's a process that is itself indebted to the sampling culture of hip-hop, even though Costello is adamant this is not his hip-hop album.

Questlove hails Costello's intensity and the speed with which he worked on the project. "A lot of people I know suffer from writer's block. This year's gone by, D'Angelo will have taken 14 years to follow the Voodoo album" – a classic, which Questlove helped produce – "and every day it's like: 'Do the lyrics yet?' 'Nah man, they ain't come to me yet.' 'What?! It's been 14 years!'"

Working with Elvis, he says, has been an education, but that concession and his more lackadaisical manner shouldn't disguise the fact that, from the start, he had a clear-eyed view of what might result as well as the potential pitfalls. "I knew I wanted to have an album, but nothing scares me more as someone who's obsessed by record reviews when a summit meeting like this takes place, because one of the parties is going to get blamed if it fails. To begin with, I didn't want to sound too funky."

Earlier, Costello had meandered into an anecdote about hanging out at Brian Wilson's house while the Beach Boy hammered out a non-stop version of Da Doo Ron Ron, and now Questlove interrupts himself: "Side note about Brian Wilson. After the Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique in 89, unbeknownst to the world, Brian Wilson had let the heads of Capitol Records talk him into making a rap record: MC Brian Wilson with the Dust Brothers, who produced the Beasties' album. One track is out there on the internet, called Smart Girls and it's hilarious! All the intentions are in the right place, but if that album had come out, someone would have called for a firing squad … But what we have," he concludes, "I think it's pretty 50-50."

"For me, there's no such thing as sounding too funky," says Costello, and while Wise Up Ghost often sounds menacingly sparse, it is also propelled by thick grooves. But as our interview draws to a close he also talks urgently about one of three tracks recorded after the main sessions were finished (they now appear on the deluxe edition) that sounds quite different to the rest of the material. "It's deeply personal. There's no fear or embarrassment there. People say I'm ironic, but I'm not ironic; I mean what I say. I'm not a poet, though Ahmir might call me one. Seamus Heaney is a poet. I'm a lyricist. I know what I am."

Diffident as he might have been about continuing his recording career, it sounds like there's mileage for this outfit yet.

Extra Elvis: Costello on Grandmaster Flash and studio secrets

Is it true that the original 1983 version of Costello's Pills and Soap was inspired by the Grandmaster Flash classic of the previous year, The Message? "It was based on it in the sense that all the records that I'd heard at that stage that were edging that way were essentially 'put your hands in the air like you just don't care' records," he replies. "There was nothing that was saying things in the same way that record was saying them. It was like a bulletin from a particular time and place. It sounded like it was true to life. That doesn't mean we can go exactly down that road, but isn't that what Bob Dylan was doing at a certain point and isn't that what Chuck Berry was doing? It goes back to the blues and to hillbilly music. It's all in the mix of rock'n'roll.

"I wanted Pills and Soap to be like that, something stripped to the essentials. I just switched on a Linn drum and played this piano part to [Attractions keyboard player] Steve Nieve, and I said: 'It sounds a bit like a Dave Brubeck thing, in my imagination.' Well, you often dream the record and it comes out of your fingers somewhat differently. So Steve played it in that epic style of his, and I half sang, half talked it and that was the record … but there was no way I was going to adopt a rap approach. That would have been ludicrous, as it would have been on this album.

"Now, when it came to this project and Ahmir said we should get more serious about it after playing together on Fallon on three occasions, the first song he proposed was – guess what? – Pills and Soap," he continues. "But I thought: 'That's 30 years ago; I've got to connect it to things I'm thinking about now.' And, actually, some of the words are more true to life than ever. So to restate them to different music gives you the chance to place the emphasis somewhere else."

Not only that, but Costello interpolated further lyrics from another old song, Hurry Down Doomsday (The Bugs Are Takin' Over), on the new track that was emerging, subsequently titled Stick Out Your Tongue. "I return to the theme of media intrusion and media intrustion is not just an inconvenience now, it's not just an embarrassing picture of someone showing their knickers getting out of a car … it involves some of the most disgraceful, debased behaviour imaginable.

"So I lifted that verse out of Hurry Down Doomsday … and then where does that lead us? It leads to all of the imbalances and injustices that we all know are there. I'm not saying anything that's unprecedented. I just wanted to give a voice to the dissent again," he adds, "and because of the spaciousness of the music, I was able to do that."

If this sounds relatively trivial, in fact the production of the record involved producer Steven Mandel sending loops to Costello with which to experiment, whether something such as an old Dilla drum part or one of the several thousand Roots tracks kept in a digital vault; while in their tiny studio above where Fallon records, the band and Costello also jammed, from which sessions, sounds would be chopped and subsequently re-assembled. In other words, as he finally concludes, "it's a real dialogue".

Wise Up Ghost is out now. Blue Note records paid for Caspar Llewellyn Smith's trip to New York.
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Re: New album for 2013: "Wise Up Ghost" (with The Roots!)

Post by verbal gymnastics »

Thanks John. That's a great interview and I think I might have one of those PhDs in Elvis-ology :lol:
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Re: New album for 2013: "Wise Up Ghost" (with The Roots!)

Post by docinwestchester »

verbal gymnastics wrote:Thanks John. That's a great interview and I think I might have one of those PhDs in Elvis-ology :lol:
That is a fascinating article. The stories that are coming out of these WUG write-ups continue to inform and amaze. I knew (by now) that both EC and Quest were sons of musicians, but that concept of "backstage kids" vs "preacher's kids" is particularly illuminating.
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Re: New album for 2013: "Wise Up Ghost" (with The Roots!)

Post by John »

Any update on your CD Verbal? CD WOW have changed the status of mine to "pending despatch". It's very disappointing not to have the product in hand this week. I am making do mainly with Spotify.
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Re: New album for 2013: "Wise Up Ghost" (with The Roots!)

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"menancingly sparse." nice
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Re: New album for 2013: "Wise Up Ghost" (with The Roots!)

Post by Jack of All Parades »

verbal gymnastics wrote:Thanks John. That's a great interview and I think I might have one of those PhDs in Elvis-ology :lol:
That could well be the best of the WUG pieces I have read to date. Thank you for the alert. Adroit readers, when combined with the Greenman piece in the booklet, should have numerous avenues of entrance into this new record. They have already provided several productive rabbit holes for me to explore. Notice the obligatory shout-out to Seamus.
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Re: New album for 2013: "Wise Up Ghost" (with The Roots!)

Post by Otis Westinghouse »

Hadn't seen the Obama + Fallon + Roots thing before. Hilarious and wonderful. It's hard to imagine any other leader of a major nation in world history being willing to participate in something as much fun as that.

Is Jimmy Fallon any good? He's got the best house band ever, and he seems to be in love with Elvis (or at least justly proud of the matchmaking he's carried out).

Amazon say mine is despatching now, and I'm almost wishing now that the absurd delivery date on it means it is coming from the US to avoid a glue debacle.
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Re: New album for 2013: "Wise Up Ghost" (with The Roots!)

Post by rightbrain »

With regard to Poor Deportee's observation about the noticeable increase in EC's use of religious (Catholic) imagery, possibly the result Ross passing away, EC was quoted in the Quietus interview recently about Thatcher's dementia: "So, on a human level I'm enough of a good Catholic, residually, to not wish that on my worst enemy."

From "Miss Mary" to "Ascension Day," EC, being the former Altar Boy said "I can't get the incense out of me clothes" and he mentioned the demolition of the Catholic Church where he was Baptized was the jumping-off point for his "Song With Rose" where he essentially admits his Catholic upbringing is "deep as the barnacles that cling."

EC has returned to that notion of the Catholic virtues of Faith, Hope, and Love (Charity), before and admits "There is hope, and after that, there is only faith/Love like a wraith."

Wraith, of course, another word for "Ghost," which brings us back full circle. In the same song he sings he was not afraid of the wraith, but rather consoled by that "Shade" . . . yet ANOTHER word for Ghost!
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Re: New album for 2013: "Wise Up Ghost" (with The Roots!)

Post by Poor Deportee »

rightbrain wrote:With regard to Poor Deportee's observation about the noticeable increase in EC's use of religious (Catholic) imagery, possibly the result Ross passing away, EC was quoted in the Quietus interview recently about Thatcher's dementia: "So, on a human level I'm enough of a good Catholic, residually, to not wish that on my worst enemy."

From "Miss Mary" to "Ascension Day," EC, being the former Altar Boy said "I can't get the incense out of me clothes" and he mentioned the demolition of the Catholic Church where he was Baptized was the jumping-off point for his "Song With Rose" where he essentially admits his Catholic upbringing is "deep as the barnacles that cling."

EC has returned to that notion of the Catholic virtues of Faith, Hope, and Love (Charity), before and admits "There is hope, and after that, there is only faith/Love like a wraith."

Wraith, of course, another word for "Ghost," which brings us back full circle. In the same song he sings he was not afraid of the wraith, but rather consoled by that "Shade" . . . yet ANOTHER word for Ghost!
There's clearly a major piece of Elvis-ology to be written on this...presumably from one of those aspiring Ph.D.s that ?uestlove talked about :lol:

"Wise Up Ghost" also echoes to me - but this may be quite idiosyncratic on my part - Springsteen's "The Ghost of Tom Joad," where once again a ghost is enjoined to respond to a time of darkness. Just a random thought.
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Re: New album for 2013: "Wise Up Ghost" (with The Roots!)

Post by MOJO »

I like the Paul's Boutique reference. One of my favorites. Now,I just have to track down the Brian Wislon does hip hop record. That has to be so hot and so bad at the same time.
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Re: New album for 2013: "Wise Up Ghost" (with The Roots!)

Post by Otis Westinghouse »

The article links to this, excruciating but hilarious with it. You'd think Weird Al Jankovic or the like had done it, but it does sound like Brian himself is the MC:
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Re: New album for 2013: "Wise Up Ghost" (with The Roots!)

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http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/entertainme ... e-edition/

Review: Elvis Costello and The Roots: ‘Wise Up Ghost and Other Songs’ (Deluxe Edition)

I know what you are thinking. Elvis Costello and the Roots? At first glance, pairing an original, cerebral punk with the world’s premiere live hip-hop band may seem like an unlikely combination. But if one looks closer at the work released by both camps over the years, it makes total sense.

Costello has spent the past 36 years shape-shifting. He’s recorded collaborative albums with everyone from Burt Bacharach to Allen Toussaint to the Brodsky Quartet to Swedish vocalist Anne Sofie Von Otter. Not bad for a guy who began his career by merging a Buddy Holly-esque image with a Clash-like cultural sneer. He’s experimented with country and rockabilly. He’s been remixed by Tricky. He’s even married to jazz vocalist Diana Krall. So a collaboration with the Roots at this point seems like a logical move from his standpoint.

The Roots have grown considerably since their early ’90s rise. One of the only hip-hop groups to play instruments, they have always worked with an eclectic sonic stew. This has been even more true in the years since they became Jimmy Fallon’s house-band. In that position, they have backed artists from just about every genre. The Roots themselves have backed everyone from Booker T. to John Legend to Erykah Badu. So, from their standpoint, a collaboration with Costello makes sense. If Costello seems like their first co-conspirator not from the hip-hop and R&B world, you haven’t been following them closely enough.

“Wise Up Ghost” brings out the best sides of both acts. Elvis at 59, somehow still seems every bit like the “angry young man” he was when he burst onto the scene. He snarls and barks throughout this record, sometimes letting his voice give in to a characteristic rasp, and during the softer moments, he exhibits his impressive abilities as a crooner. The Roots treat Costello like a new toy, experimenting with different backdrops and templates. The dub-heavy lead-off track, “Walk Us Uptown,” sounds like a forward-thinking dance-hall remix of a track that would’ve fit well on “This Year’s Model.”

This is a groove-based album at its core, firmly placed in a tradition built by Curtis Mayfield and Marvin Gaye. “Sugar Won’t Work” finds Costello paired with an orchestra and a funky “Superfly” bass-line. This is the most authentic soul music Costello has ever produced. It’s something he has experimented with before, but he has never fully succeeded at this level. The Roots are most definitely the ones to thank. Together, they are making a record on par with Motown’s funky output from the late ’60s and early ’70s. Here the Roots are acting as the modern answer to the Funk Brothers. This gets to be increasingly true as the disc progresses, from the nearly acid-washed jam of “Refuse to Be Saved” to the mighty, slow, menacing strut of “Wake Me Up.”

“Tripwire” is a beautifully serene lullaby, bringing to mind the work of golden-age Smokey Robinson. Pairing such a sweet backdrop with Costello’s typically cryptic and dense lyrical style creates an interesting contrast.

“Stick Out Your Tongue” is a standout track with its silky, scratch-driven groove. Lyrically, Costello does something risky. He recycles lines and themes from his back-catalog, singing about “pills and soap” and spouting out the line “in time you can turn these obsessions into careers.”

He does this later on the album, too, on the deluxe bonus track “Can You Hear Me?” recycling lines from 2002′s “When I Was Cruel” track. This could make it seem as if Costello had run out of ideas, but anyone familiar with his work and his massive level of output knows that is not the case. This practice merely ties this album to the rest (and the best) of his work. The title track borrows a recognizable signature from Costello’s “Can You Be True,” while one look at the picture of Costello with a camera in the center of the album’s booklet is an instant reminder of the iconic cover of “This Year’s Model.”

“Come the Meantimes” sounds like the Roots modern, sped-up answer to Isaac Hayes’ often sampled “Ike’s Rap II,” while “(She Might Be A) Grenade” delivers a sly, funky burst. “Cinco Minotos Con Vos” is an unlikely duet between Costello and Latin vocalist La Marisoul.

“Viceroy’s Row” places Costello over a horn-driven groove that wouldn’t sound out of place on one of Common’s records, a notion that brings to mind my only minor complaint about the record. The Roots are a hip-hop group. This album has no rapping. I would’ve liked to hear Black Thought bust out a verse from time to time between Costello’s verses.

This matter aside, “Wise Up Ghost” is among the strongest collections Costello has ever put out. (No joke! It is probably among his top six best records.) Both Costello and the Roots further showcase their elasticity. This album is a standout in both of their respective, rightly extensively celebrated discographies. I hope the “Number One” etched into the album’s cover is an indication that this is not merely a one-off collaboration but rather just the beginning of a beautiful musical relationship. This record is pure gold from every angle.
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Re: New album for 2013: "Wise Up Ghost" (with The Roots!)

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http://marquettetribune.org/2013/09/19/ ... seupghost/

The Roots, Costello collaborate on gritty new album

Though “Wise Up Ghost” isn’t likely to be played on the Top 40 rotation, it’s one of the edgiest and potentially legendary pairings in a long time.

Elvis Costello and The Roots deliver a punch on their new collaborative album, “Wise Up Ghost,” released Tuesday. The album is the perfect balance of soul and punk, representing some of The Root’s and Costello’s best work in years.

Elvis Costello is an iconic rock ‘n roller known for blending effortlessly with the most unexpected people, collaborating with stars from Paul McCartney to Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong. His ability to be a stylistic chameleon is highlighted in this project with hip-hop jazz group The Roots.

This unlikely mash-up marriage began backstage at “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon,” when Costello was a guest on The Roots’ home turf as the show’s house band. The Roots’ drummer, Questlove, suggested they record an EP together. The collaboration worked so well they decided to make a full album instead – and it’s a good thing they did.

Costello’s voice is biting and tangy as usual, but the backing by The Roots’ funky beats brings a twist to the English punk musician’s style. His lyrics are experimental and raw, blending with The Roots’ brassy trumpets and funky bass lines, giving the album a seedy, sexy, back-alley vibe.

Costello uses this opportunity to reinvent himself yet again, delving into a trouble-filled, wicked world of betrayal and angst. Unlike many of his fallen ’70s punk-rock colleagues, now sitting at home in corduroys and slippers, Costello has evolved with the times, allowing the music industry to take him where it will.

Album opener “Walk Us Uptown” is filled with a brassy, addicting chorus and Costello’s classic repetition, but when you dig down beneath the surface, you’ll find stinging lyrics like “While our tears run in torrents/ To suffer in silence or pay for some solace.”

Costello slows it down in “Tripwire,” sampling from his own 1989 hit “Satellite.” The recycling of his classic song is smooth and lulling, but much like “Walk Us Uptown,” the lyrics ferment and bubble underneath the sweet doo-wop sound.

In the culture shock song “Refuse To Be Saved,” Costello makes a reference to Gil Scott Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” slamming a generation that believes everything the TV feeds them. He lets The Roots take over the melodies and beats, sticking with poetic, spoken word verses.

Costello has been releasing music since the ’70s, but still has an appeal that isn’t limited to your cool uncle and hipster roommate. He’s off the radar for most mainstream fans, but when you venture away from the well-tread path of synthesizers and one-size-fits-all lyrics, you’ll find the underbelly of Costello and The Roots’ sexy vocal lines and bright jazz riffs.

Though The Roots and Costello form an odd couple, they mesh together beautifully, making “Wise Up Ghost” one of this year’s most affecting surprises.
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Re: New album for 2013: "Wise Up Ghost" (with The Roots!)

Post by sweetest punch »

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/entertainment ... d=11126542

Album review: Elvis Costello and The Roots, Wise Up Ghost

Even in Elvis Costello's unpredictable career (rock and country to string quartets, soundtracks and and music for a ballet among many other things), this album with the American hip-hop outfit the Roots comes as unexpected. But the real surprise is that it isn't what might be anticipated - typically wordy Costello's lyrics bent towards rap - but a clever mash-up of stalking beats, samples, strings and horns with some of Costello's previous lyrics given unexpected re-settings.

Lines and small musical samples are pulled in from songs separated by decades. The appropriately eerie Stick Out Your Tongue here, for example, is a slow moody take on his frantic Pills and Soap (from Punch the Clock in 83) with lines inserted from the furious Hurry Down Doomsday (from Mighty Like a Rose, '91) and from the more recent National Anthem. The result is an entirely new piece, as is the funky New Orleans take of Wake Me Up, which has its origins in the furiously impenetrable song Bedlam off his 2004 album The Delivery Man.

Elsewhere across most of these bent but beguiling songs there are other lyrical or musical references to his past, but with the presence of the Roots, weird string parts and places where the vocals are echoed and delayed, this is more than merely a clever exercise.

Even if you recognise some of the songs' origins (and hardly matters if you don't) they become completely different experiences and lines that once meant one thing now mean another. Throughout, Costello mostly dials down the melodrama and vibrato he can be prone to employ, so much of this also feels uncomfortably up close and menacing.

But they also bring beauty: the deceptively romantic and 50s-sounding Tripwire (opening with a sample from Satellite, off Spike from '89, which the song is built around) and the new If I Could Believe at the end as a hopeful closer among the preceding unease, are among the most sensitive he has written. Although Tripwire's lyrics suggest darker places than the melody and delivery evokes.

Costello's career has been one of constant musical shape-shifting but this outing - not "his rap album" as you might think - is unexpected and unexpectedly good.

Promisingly the cover reads "Number One".

Stars: 4.5/5
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Re: New album for 2013: "Wise Up Ghost" (with The Roots!)

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http://www.lasvegasweekly.com/ae/music/ ... ise-ghost/

Album review: Elvis Costello and The Roots’ ‘Wise Up Ghost’

3 stars (out of 5)

In a recent interview, Elvis Costello stressed that his collaboration album with The Roots, “is not my hip-hop record,” and indeed, Wise Up Ghost plays like anything but a straightforward hip-hop record (Roots rapper Black Thought isn’t even present). The album mashes together strolling funk, ’70s action-movie-theme drama, fiery soul-rock, gravelly R&B and, yes, smart hip-hop.

What’s most interesting about these songs is how the chameleonic Costello assimilates (and even disappears into) each style. “Wake Me Up,” resembles the spoken-word of Soul Coughing. The downtempo neo-soul seduction of “Cinco Minutos Con Vos” is a pretty credible David Bowie approximation. And standout “Sugar Won’t Work” is a syrupy, retro-soul croon with flickering organ bleats and laid-back rhythms. It all adds up to a collection of ideas and grooves rather than a defined collection of songs, though, and that leaves Wise Up Ghost feeling meandering and unfocused—a shame considering The Roots are one of the tightest backing bands on the planet.
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Re: New album for 2013: "Wise Up Ghost" (with The Roots!)

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http://mimo.recordingconnection.com/elv ... ew/966237/

Elvis Costello and The Roots “Wise Up Ghost And Other Songs”–Album Review

Aging British pub-rocker Elvis Costello and hip-hop’s greatest band The Roots are, depending on how you look at it, either a progressive or an odd pairing. However, the two are certainly at a stage in their respective careers where experimentation is expected, if not necessarily welcomed or desired by longtime fans. For Wise Up Ghost And Other Songs, their new collaborative album, the recipe is simple subtraction and addition: the Roots’ frontman, emcee Black Thought, is replaced by Costello. Sans rap, it’s still the same powerhouse band, with drummer and music guru Questlove on the drums and the rest of the band’s members – over the years they’ve changed a lot – presumably the same as those that comprise the house band on Jimmy Fallon’s late-night talk show.

The Roots more than do Costello justice and vice versa, placing Wise Up Ghost right up there with the well-received works from hip-hop-associated blues-rockers Robert Glasper and Gary Clark Jr. Besides being a collaboration between two respected brands in their respective genres, Wise Up Ghost is sheer marketing genius because it allows for a natural cross-pollination of fan bases. Just as The Roots’ largely hip-hop fan base has likely only heard of Elvis Costello in passing, the latter’s fans may have had little to no exposure to The Roots.

Released on legendary jazz label Blue Note Records, Wise Up Ghost has little in common with any previous album from The Roots and even less with hip-hop. Instead, Costello’s gruffy voice is instantly in cahoots with The Roots’ soundscapes, which range from slow to mid-tempo and stylistically from progressive rock to blues. The album has a vintage feel and a stripped-down theme, as echoed by the record’s plain cover art, and it plays out like a 1970s film soundtrack. On some songs, such as “Walk Us Uptown,” Questlove’s drums drive the groove, while on others like “SUGAR Won’t’ Work” and “REFUSE To Be Saved,” the guitar licks take the lead. Costello’s voice is a constant and consistent presence that is essentially an instrument itself. For lyrics-discerning fans, a lyric sheet will be mandatory.

Being that Wise Up Ghost and Other Songs is an experimental collaboration between more standard projects for both The Roots and Elvis Costello, it didn’t arrive with hype and ridiculously high expectations. Instead, with the calendar dotted with so many hyped releases in the weeks before and after its release, it is as understated a release as could come from Grammy Award-winning musicians. However, the music and Costello’s singing are far from understated; they are simply really good.

3.5 / 5 stars
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Re: New album for 2013: "Wise Up Ghost" (with The Roots!)

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John wrote:Any update on your CD Verbal? CD WOW have changed the status of mine to "pending despatch". It's very disappointing not to have the product in hand this week. I am making do mainly with Spotify.
Mine's still on back order. I emailed them yesterday but no response as yet.
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Re: New album for 2013: "Wise Up Ghost" (with The Roots!)

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sweetest punch wrote:http://mimo.recordingconnection.com/elv ... ew/966237/

Elvis Costello and The Roots “Wise Up Ghost And Other Songs”–Album Review

Aging British pub-rocker Elvis Costello
With that opener I thought "Here we go :roll:" . A fair review is spoil by a lazy opening.

Whilst I can guess at the answer, is there anything official as to why Black Thought wasn't involved with either the recording or the live show?
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Re: New album for 2013: "Wise Up Ghost" (with The Roots!)

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Poor Deportee wrote:Oh, my goodness.

I've listened to this thing twice now. Loved it from start to finish, right from the get-go. I actually found myself choking up slightly at one point, because of the bizarre and completely unexpected feeling that THIS is the Elvis whose music I first loved. As counter-intuitive as it sounds, there is a direct line from this record to his peak work with the Attractions (GH!!, Trust, Armed Forces, etc.). Part of it is the joyous revelling in the studio - effects, echoes, backing himself, making himself sound weird and different, all things he used to do but abandoned sometime around 1993. Part of it is the rhythmic sensibility, another part the absence of affect in the lyric; and finally, HE IS SINGING: not reaching, hollering, but just letting his voice be his voice, with any further effects added at the console.

On the second go-round, I choked up (a bit, mind - I never was a big bawler :mrgreen: ) at the sheer poignant beauty of "Tripwire."

But my favourite sample is the hilarious borrowing of the tuba riff from "Chewing Gum." Now THAT's something nobody saw coming - building a whole song off that!

Even my 9-year-old daughter, she of P!nk, Taylor Swift, etc., digs this record. The moment it began she expressed surprise: "Elvis Costello is singing hip hop???" Five minutes later: "He's a good rapper!" and clapping along in the back seat :lol: No better proof exists that this WILL be a hit record if it's presented properly.
Now that I have had an initial moment to digest the record I, too, have been taken in that direction. More to come as there is much to digest. If one can get the Deluxe version do so- not so much for the additional songs which are nice but not essential but for the 'feel'- this has to do with the 'poetry' and though he may not be "Seamus" he is a lyricist of considerable skill and this go round has seen an upping of his game- as I now think I understand Ahmir's earlier Pound reference though it is another poet I will utilize.
"....there's a merry song that starts in 'I' and ends in 'You', as many famous pop songs do....'
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Re: New album for 2013: "Wise Up Ghost" (with The Roots!)

Post by bronxapostle »

twitter tonight......



benjamin agostino ‏@bronxapostle 9m
@StevenMandel with my 1st spin of cd in the car, when CINCO MINUTOS CON VOS began, i just KNEW it would end at 5:00 sharp!! good work boys.


Steven Mandel ‏@StevenMandel 56s
You're the first to notice that inside joke. “@bronxapostle: When CINCO MINUTOS CON VOS began, i just KNEW it would end at 5:00 sharp!!"
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Re: New album for 2013: "Wise Up Ghost" (with The Roots!)

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Perfect!
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Re: New album for 2013: "Wise Up Ghost" (with The Roots!)

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At last I have had an email saying Cd despatched. Looking forward to having the nice quality and the words to fully appreciate the album.
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Re: New album for 2013: "Wise Up Ghost" (with The Roots!)

Post by Poor Deportee »

John wrote:At last I have had an email saying Cd despatched. Looking forward to having the nice quality and the words to fully appreciate the album.
You won't be disappointed. This record is the gift that keeps on giving.
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Re: New album for 2013: "Wise Up Ghost" (with The Roots!)

Post by the_platypus »

I picked up the deluxe edition for 14 dollars at an FYE store in upstate NY. I really like the booklet.
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