Elvis Costello & The Imposters - "Drum And Bone" (mp3)

A back catalog as large and wildly uneven as Elvis Costello's seems to provoke a lot of extreme opinions -- there are those who dismiss everything after those first 3 albums (which, admittedly, are by almost any measure still his peak), and those who'll find something to recommend in all of those dozens of records, even the ones where he's most out of his element or uninspired. Me, I've been listening faithfully for over a decade, and still haven't heard it all and am not sure I want to, but get enjoyment out of cherry-picking through the spots in the discography that seem most promising. So I'm happy to stick to Elvis the cerebral pop singer in all his many modes, and avoid most of the collaborative albums by Elvis the ambitious dilettante who keeps on trying on hats he has no business wearing, literally and figuratively (although I am a big fan of the one with Bacharach).

So in recent years, I've been limiting my interest in Costello's goings-ons to his rock-oriented albums with The Imposters, which are, for all intents and purposes, the same as the band that backed him on 90% of his best work, The Attractions (with just the one least crucial member swapped out for another). 2002's When I Was Cruel was the kind of overhyped 'return to form' album that never ages well after the initial buzz wears off, but it's still a pretty good record, as was 2004's The Delivery Man. But the Imposters' latest, Momofuku is not.

As much as Costello gets a hard time for giving almost every album some genre pastiche concept, when he doesn't it ends up being kind of hard to assign an identity to it. Momofuku has got a little bit of the rustic country vibe of The Delivery Man, but less so. And singing backup on many songs, is Jenny Lewis of Rilo Kiley, which the more I think about it feels like a mirror image of the pairing of Woody Allen and Scarlett Johansson (over the hill genius with critically adored but really pretty much talentless young ingenue). The show I saw Elvis play three years ago with Emmylou Harris was really fantastic, and it's a shame she wasn't drafted as his country songstress foil here, instead of this year's inferior model. But even a choice like that wouldn't have salvaged Momofuku, because the songs just aren't there. Or rather they're there, but they're really annoying songs, shallow character sketches with stupid titles like "Mr. Feathers" and "Flutter And Wow" that he seems far too comfortable to repeat over and over throughout the songs.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 06, 2008 at 3:32 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.