Elvis Costello - This Year's Model (Deluxe Edition 2008) Review

More than a decade ago, Elvis Costello announced plans to stop selling his early albums. "People must have them by now if they want them," he reasoned. "What I'd really like to do is delete them and destroy them so they could never come out again. That would be kind of cool. I'm sure I'll change my mind about it."

Guess he changed his mind. In fact, the old git cranks out expanded editions of his early work as fast as he releases new music. That's fine — everyone should have a copy of This Year's Model, especially if you're a prematurely embittered teen romantic or would like to become one. "No Action," "Hand in Hand," "Lip Service" — these are some of the snarliest love-is-hell songs ever written....full text When I first read that Hip-O was going to reissue Elvis Costello’s debut album My Aim Is True, I was incredibly skeptical. The album had already been reissued approximately 219,000 times; another edition stank of pure, unhinged, uncontrollable record company (or musician) greed.

But when the Hip-O version turned out to actually be quite good – a few tunes that had never been released before, plus an early live concert, were included – I was pleasantly surprised. Even if this reissue wasn’t exactly the definitive version of the album (it didn’t by any means top the Rhino version), it had a reason to exist and wasn’t a fleecing of Costello’s fans.

Hip-O’s reissue campaign continues with its release of This Year’s Model. Costello’s second album and the first one featuring The Attractions, the album is rightly recognized as a stone classic, full of the anger, spite, and revenge that Costello personified in the late 1970s. Of course, this album has been reissued previously. The 2002 Rhino reissue was a welcome new take on the album. Jammed full of demos and other goodies, and featuring Costello’s humorous and honest liner notes, that edition appeared to be the final word on the album....full text In helping launch and nurture the punk/New Wave movement in the late Seventies, Elvis Costello unleashed a genuine fusillade of expression in a very short period of time. At a time when it had become increasingly common for artists to take multiple years to produce new albums of original material, the once and future Declan McManus put out three full albums of new songs from 1977 through 1979, proving himself to be as prolific as his band and producer Nick Lowe were proficient.

The second album in a triptych that includes My Aim is True and Armed Forces, This Year’s Model is now available in a deluxe two-Dd edition, compiling the various b-sides and singles Costello released around this time, as well as a full concert from 1978 with his band The Attractions, co-billed—and appropriately so-- for the first time on this album. While the bulk of the miscellaneous material has already seen the light of day via previous reissues, this live recording, all but one selection of which remained heretofore unreleased (“Chemistry Class” from the next album to come, hinting at the eventual bane of Costello’s work, an all too clever manipulations of language) reaffirms Elvis’ band played as incisively as he composed.

The original British running order of the studio album appears on disc one, now as then different than the truncated American sequencing. Moving on through the ‘bonus’ tracks such as “Tiny Steps: and “Big Tears” suggests any number of variations on the material would’ve comprised a powerful album. And inasmuch as producer Nick Lowe does his duty by focusing on the stripped down elemental attack of Steve Nieve’s keyboards, Bruce Thomas’ bass and Pete Thomas’ drums, the musicianship hits as hard and deep as lyrics of Costello’s such as “Night Rally” and "This Year’s Girl.”...full text