Elvis Costello-"National Ransom" reviewed

I can completely envision a scenario where some long time fans of Elvis Costello, upon hearing him whistle the melody towards the end of “A Slow Drag With Josephine” off his new LP “National Ransom”, would go lunging for the CD player in frustration and chuck this entire record into the bin. Which is unfortunate, because this thing’s not all that bad.

There’s more than enough eclecticism here to confound even his most loyal fans. While I can appreciate the fact that at this point in his career Costello continues to explore many different styles to get his tunes across, it’s ultimately frustrating to know that if about one fourth of these songs were left off this 62 minute effort it would easily be his strongest work since “All This Useless Beauty”. The most surprising thing here is that the experiments end up working infinitely better than the tried and true.

The album’s opener and title track is straight forward enough, even if it does lack a discernable melody. It’s almost as if Costello feels obligated to deliver a rocker, but is ultimately not interested in painting with those colors for very long. It’s also somewhat ironic in that in his overall attempt to use a wide variety of styles, the tunes that are the most “Elvis-like” are where most of this record’s missteps occur. Along with the title song, add “Five Small Words” and “I Lost You” as decent, but familiar ground that he’s covered more successfully on previous records.

From there we are treated to bathtub gin era jazz, (Jimmie Standing In The Rain) to dense Bacharach-esque chord structures, (Stations Of The Cross) to bluesy rock and roll (My Lovely Jezebel). All three of these songs are terrific, with some of the most inspired lyrics and vocal melodies we’ve gotten from the man in recent memory.

“Church Underground” is another standout number that features a type of twisted Salvation Army Band rhythm track which, when combined with the impassioned vocal and eerily filthy subject matter adds up to a tune that easily ranks among his very best. It’s immediately followed up by “You Hung The Moon”, a number that Sinatra would have died to sing if he was wasn’t dead already and is so good it makes things like “Almost Blue” (the song) seem inferior by comparison.

So it’s the variety of styles here that make for most of the high points. It ends up succeeding where something like say, “Spike” failed in that it was just too much of a scattershot affair with not much substance holding it together. On “National Ransom”, Costello feeds off the “Spike” template, but raises the songwriting ante considerably and combines that with the unifying theme of bankruptcy (both literally and morally) as the glue.