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| Absolutepunk |
 National Ransom is Elvis Costello’s latter-day masterpiece. Woven within the album’s sixty-two minutes and sixteen tracks are the influences and products from virtually every era of Costello’s enormously diverse career. The album encompasses his entire musical journey: the punk-rock energy of his beginnings in the 1970’s as a smart and angry young man tearing through the UK taking whatever musical element he wanted, practical evidence of an ongoing obsession with American country music, countless pseudonyms, various “return to form” rock albums throughout the last few decades, and an encyclopedic familiarity with all music and its practitioners. Lyrically, on National Ransom Costello traverses familiar emotional terrain, with large helpings of guilt, longing, cynicism, and trademark biting humor and rage. The title track is a blistering attack on Wall Street corruption and greed, and songs like “Jimmie Standing in the Rain” and “Stations of the Cross” are touching character studies that depict a world rife with loss, regret and wasted opportunity. “That’s Not the Part of Him You’re Leaving”—sharing personal top billing with “National Ransom” as my favorite song on the album—is a wonderful, musically and lyrically melodramatic, steel-pedal drenched take on jealous love. Country-styled ballads such as “You Hung the Moon” and “All These Strangers” explore the ravages of war (though from a lyrical perspective that borrows more from WWI than Iraq, but Costello has always been a classicist at heart). “A Slow Drag with Josephine” is a delightful, garrulous, 20’s-styled shuffle; this and closer “A Voice in the Dark” feel like relics from a long distant, but still relevant past. In this sense, it’s a timeless album, although one gets the sense that it couldn’t have emerged from any other time and place. And it is unexpected flourishes—the way a sharp drumbeat mingles so effectively with the strummed guitar and country piano on “That’s Not the Part…,” the bassoon accents and slightly wet (for lack of a better word) vocal delivery of “One Bell Ringing,” the brass section climax in “A Church Underground,” the whistling at the end of “A Slow Drag…,” the scat-singing in the intro of “A Voice in the Dark,” the very way Costello chooses to pronounce “baboon”—that make the album such a satisfying and rewarding listening experience. Guitar twang is perfectly applied throughout. It’s the perfect mixture of flavors....full text |
| Bbc |
| Elvis Costello can’t be accused of genre-fear. Over an illustrious career of inspiring Bret Easton Ellis titles he’s also attempted opera, punk, jazz and soul. He can be forgiven then for making two consecutive studio albums which stick to a core of country and Americana. To focus on the trappings (and the list of "respected" players) however, is to miss the point. Whatever the stylings, the crux of Costello remains his songs, voice and words. It’s these which have enabled him to survive dips over decades, and avoid stagnation. His blatant craving to be identified within the Great American Songbook has also helped him to float above fashion. Last year’s Secret, Profane & Sugarcane sold much more strongly in the US than in the UK, and this is effectively its sequel. Like its predecessor, it was produced by T Bone Burnett in Nashville in under a fortnight. Musicians include recurring cohorts The Impostors and The Sugarcanes, plus cameos by Vince Gill, Marc Ribot, Buddy Miller and Leon Russell. Inevitably then, it’s "rootsy", with all the lap-steel that entails. It never works magic with such elements the way Robert Plant seems able to, but it’s a solid, generally impressive hour. It suggests topical themes of deprivation and bankruptcy, but the lyrics play fast and loose, often digressing into standard, if dark, love ballads. The title song rages at Wall Street, a little foggily. Indeed several songs chug by placidly, hamstrung by Burnett’s generic tropes. Stations of the Cross is the first number to entice and enthral, with some of the broodiness of Pills and Soap. It breaks the rut, and the album then ascends and transcends through Five Small Words and Church Underground: Costello at his best, the music freeing up his unique voice rather than turning him into any old bar-room bluesman. (The nadir is Russell’s My Lovely Jezebel, which could be Cliff fronting Status Quo.)...full text |
| Popmatters |
| If Elvis Costello ever makes good on his threat to stop making albums, we’d be a greedy lot to protest. Costello could’ve quit the game after Blood & Chocolate and still found his icon status written in cement. After flirting with irrelevance during the 1990s, the man born Declan MacManus has spent the last decade brazenly genre hopping at a speed that easily embarrasses the majority of his contemporaries. While the unmistakable sound of his legendary voice, along with his compositional skills, seem to somehow grow more refined with each passing year, Costello has recently expanded his repertoire to include a remarkable stint as a talk show host. With the transition from angry young man to dapper rock ‘n’ roll elder statesman and citizen of the world long complete, Costello could be scarcely be faulted for hanging up his fedora and leaving the (allegedly) antiquated business of recording an album to the younger set. While the debate over the usefulness of the album format in modern times is likely to rage on until music ceases being pressed to wax, Costello’s latest effort, the T-Bone Burnett produced National Ransom, offers evidence to both sides of the debate. The album somehow manages to be both a sprawling, richly cinematic throwback LP and a schizophrenic anti-album at the same time. Having mastered nearly every genre of popular music save for hip-hop, Costello has been mindful about approaching each project with a specific genre in mind. National Ransom, however, marks perhaps the first time where the man has fearlessly dabbled in different genres under the same umbrella. It would make for a jarring listen had Costello not filled it with some of the most expansive songwriting of an already storied career. Recorded in quick bursts down in Nashville, the album sounds like something Costello has been plotting out for most of the last decade....full text |
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