What, Neil Young’s recording an anti-Bush album with a choir and a trumpet filling out the voice, guitar, bass and drums? You’re kidding. He’d never do anything like that....
That was Living With War.
What, Springsteen’s ditched the E Street Band and he’s cutting an album of traditional folkie stuff with something called the Seeger Sessions Band? Get outta here....
And he debuted the album and the band at Jazzfest in New Orleans. (Actually, a pedant might argue that it was at the Asbury Park Convention Hall, but that was credited as a rehearsal, rather than a public debut).
What, you say Elvis Costello’s recording a new album? Coming out on vinyl? Maybe not even on CD at all? Called Momofuku? What kinda name is that?
He has. It did. Publicity hype. Yep. Named after the guy who invented instant cup noodles.
Fittingly, it leads off with No Hiding Place a slice of invective aimed directly at today’s less-than-wonderful (in Elvis’ eyes) wired world from the increasingly jaundiced viewpoint of someone who at least remembers the days when he was an angry young man and still harbours shards of the resentment that powered much of his early work.
We are, after all, dealing with the guy who claimed, thirty years ago, that his major motivations were revenge and guilt. If the angry young man bit has been overdone over the years increasingly pissed-off middle-aged misanthrope might be a fair summary of the persona Costello has tended to display in interviews over the past few years.
But to me, the best thing about the album is the way the first couple of tracks bring albums like This Year’s Model, Armed Forces and Imperial Bedroom to mind. There’s plenty of venom in the wordplay, guitars crunch along and Steve Nieve’s keyboards add punctuation as they weave in and out of tunes, loaded with hook lines and layered vocals. In particular, you can hear plenty of This Year’s Model in American Gangster Time. There’s a great pounding rhythm running through Turpentine, where the backing vocals sound like they’ve been spread with a butter knife.