National Ransom
2010, Hear Music, Sound Emporium, Nashville TN

1. National Ransom
2. Jimmie Standing In the Rain
3. Stations Of the Cross
4. A Slow Drag With Josephine
5. Five Small Words
6. Church Underground
7. You Hung the Moon
8. Bullets For the New-Born King
9. I Lost You [Costello/Lauderdale]
10. Dr. Watson, I Presume
11. One Bell Ringing
12. The Spell That You Cast
13. That's Not the Part Of Him You're Leaving
14. My Lovely Jezebel [Costello/Burnett/Russel]
15. All These Strangers [Costello/Burnett]
16. A Voice In the Dark
17. I Hope [iTunes bonus track]

It's good to know that Elvis Costello's continuing to be so prolific even at his relatively old age. He has, after all, been a professional musician for 34 years, and a performer for even longer than that, and here he is releasing one album practically every year as of the last decade. It's all a very exciting time to be a fan of his, unlike certain other songwriters I'm a huge fan of *coughdavidbowiecough* So here we have his seventh album in the space of nine years. The fact that he continues to tour just as often as he appears on TV as well as recording gives me hope that one day soon I'll be able to actually see him live. The fact that I haven't already, despite having plenty of opportunities to do so, is one of those mysteries of life - like how black pudding's so tasty despite what's in it, or how two of the worst authors alive today are also two of the most successful of the last ten years (yes Steph Meyer and Dan Brown, I'm looking at you), and so on.

Anyway, when it came to recording this album, more or less the same strategies that saw 2009's Secret, Profane and Sugarcane pop out of the ether. Costello's long-time collaborator T-Bone Burnett was called back into the studio as producer. On top of this, Costello's touring band of the last couple of years was called back into the studio. That band was, of course, the Sugarcanes - consisting of Jim Lauderdale on guitar, Jerry Douglas on the dobro, mandolinist Mike Compton, violinist Stuart Duncan, Dennis Crouch playing the double bass and Jeff Taylor squeezing his accordion. In a new twist though, Costello's faithful backing band from his earlier days, the Imposters (the Attractions of the 21st century if you will) were also called in to give many of the songs a harder edge. Well, most of the Imposters anyway. The only place you'll hear bassist Davey Farragher at all is on Five Small Words. Otherwise, keyboardist Steve Nieve and drummer Pete Thomas are used more or less across the whole album. Whatever the ins and outs of the whole thing, a studio fitted and prepared, work began on the album last February, carrying on through to March.

The sound of National Ransom is pretty hard to pin down in a sentence, as saying there's a lot going on here stylistically would be a hell of an understatement. Such is one reason why this album may seem very hard to approach on the first, second or even third listens. I'll confess, I was no different when I first got hold of this. You've got hard hard rockers (My Lovely Jezebel), torch music (You Hung the Moon), bluegrass (Dr. Watson, I Presume), acoustic ballads (One Bell Ringing), swingers (a Voice In the Dark), vaudevillian-type tunes (Jimmie Standing In the Rain), and that's only half the story really. Basically, if you've got enough of this guy's music to picture every kind of music Costello's peddled over the last decade (well, except for blue-eyed soul or jazz which you won't find anywhere here, or the electronica of When I Was Cruel for that matter), picture the kind of album mashing them all together would create. That's what National Ransom is. If there is a dominant sound in spite of this album's eclectic nature, it's probably the Americana-tinged flavour of Secret, Profane and Sugarcane, although this time given to us via the backing of the traditional rock band that banged out Momofuku way back when in 2008 (the Imposters, of course).

How does it hold up then? I'll first say that when I first heard this album, I wasn't really blown away by it. In fact, you need only look back a couple of posts in this thread to see what I used to think of it. I said something like how I thought that National Ransom was impressive enough, but I didn't really like it as much as Secret, Profane and Sugarcane. I think my opinion of both has gone in opposite directions since then. These days, I only really listen to the same four or five tracks from the latter, whereas this one's really gone up in my estimations of late. I am, as you'll see from looking back over this thread, a huge fan of Costello's more eclectic and ambitious albums, such as Mighty Like a Rose. Costello's other unflinchingly eclectic masterpiece Spike just happens to be one of my favourite albums of all time. Basically, as with both of those albums, I put off forming a real opinion on it for a long time as even when I wasn't so impressed by it, I knew that just writing it off as nothing all that interesting would be doing a real injustice to its better songs. Momofuku was an album I knew was just adequate and nothing more from the first play-through. There's something golden below the surface of this one though, to the point that I agree with the man himself when he says that this is his best album in years. I wouldn't say it's better than the Delivery Man or the River In Reverse, but with those exceptions it's definitely his finest album since 1996's All This Useless Beauty.

In short, while a few duds like Five Small Words, the god-awful title track and All These Strangers weigh the album down a bit, songs like Church Underground, Bullets For the New-Born King, a Voice In the Dark and a Slow Drag With Josephine are already some of my favourite Costello songs ever. Given the kind of album this is, I'm sure more will emerge over time. All in all though, this is certainly among the better Costello albums you'll hear, and I can't wait to see what he's got up his sleeve for us next.

8/10




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National Ransack EP
2010, Hear Music, Nashville TN

1. Poor Borrowed Dress [Costello/Lauderdale]
2. Condemned Man
3. Big Boys Cry [Raven]
4. I Don't Want To Go Home

And then there's this - a free digital EP given away with orders of copies of National Ransom via the album's official website, which saw a release on vinyl just in time for Christmas Day. It's quite the stocking filler as well as it's really, really impressive for what it is, ie an assortment of National Ransom outtakes bundled together in the interests of fan service. Overall, with the exception of the cover of Eddy Raven's (I've checked him him out - he's crap, although this cover's nice enough) Big Boys Cry the EP concentrates on Costello's new-found love for writing and playing bluegrass music, as I'm sure the below video will specify. In essence, I implore you to get this EP for the following four reasons:

1. If National Ransom's length and eclectic nature make it seem like you'd be biting off more than you can chew, if you get this you can say you have a 2010 Elvis Costello release like all the other cool kids.
2. This EP is a wonderful introduction to bluegrass music if you've never dipped your toes into it before.
3. The level of quality on this is far more consistent than on National Ransom.
4. I Don't Want To Go Home is now one of my five favourite Elvis Costello songs of all time.