The Boy Named If, new album by Elvis & The Imposters, January 14, 2022

Pretty self-explanatory
Post Reply
sweetest punch
Posts: 5961
Joined: Sat Apr 03, 2004 5:49 am
Location: Belgium

Re: The Boy Named If, new album by Elvis & The Imposters, January 14, 2022

Post by sweetest punch »

https://riffmagazine.com/album-reviews/ ... OuEImWCJh4

ALBUM REVIEW: Elvis Costello returns with smart, feisty ‘The Boy Named If’

The Boy Named If
Elvis Costello
8/10

What is it with rock musicians and children’s books? These days, it seems like every other songwriter or band is putting out some kind of storybook-themed concept album. The most recent X Ambassadors LP, The Beautiful Liar, couched its rather bland breakup songs in a half-baked audiobook-for-kids conceit. Then last November, Jet frontman Nic Cester released his solo album The Skipping Girl and an accompanying children’s book. And now, we have new wave stalwart Elvis Costello, whose latest release, The Boy Named If, is ostensibly held together by—you guessed it—a children’s book concept.

According to Capitol Records, the album will be available in the standard formats as well as “an 88-page hardback storybook edition,” which will include 13 illustrated stories named after the songs.
Costello devotees with extra cash can splurge on the special edition if they want. However, the album in itself should satisfy devotees and average listeners alike, even if they can’t quite follow the putative storyline.

That’s because The Boy Named If features Costello’s stock in trade for almost half a century: impeccably crafted melodies, tart lyrics and vocals that blend punk venom with classic crooner elegance. Not only that, he and his backing band The Imposters attack this baker’s dozen with such straight-ahead focus that they call to mind the days of This Year’s Model and Armed Forces.

The album opens with “Farewell, Ok,” a garage-rock rave-up that finds Elvis Costello playing a familiar part: He’s a jilted lover railing against the person who’s done him wrong. He bellows out lines like “I thought you’d change/ And get a little humble” with such pain and bitterness that you could almost forget he’s (hopefully) happily married and raising two teenage boys. Meanwhile, Pete Thomas’ nimble drumming pushes the song forward as Steve Nieve’s organ give it a carnival-ride-gone-bad feel.
Up next is the stomping title track, which presents a larger-than-life trickster who can fall from tightropes and cliffs and live to make mischief another day. The bridge’s invitation to visit “Magic Lantern Land” evokes fairy tales, but the music’s swagger calls to mind figures like Muddy Waters’s Mannish Boy or Willie Dixon’s Little Red Rooster. Costello sneers his way through the song as if he’s savoring every wicked syllable.

The third track, “Penelope Halfpenny,” conjures up a female counterpart to The Boy Named If. The sugary organ and Costello’s twee vocals might strike some as a little too arch or cutesy, but the nimble drumming and Davey Faragher’s rubbery bass provide some muscle. Venom comes back to the fore on the lilting, off-kilter “The Distance,” which takes the side of a woman in a bad romance and tosses in hints of incest and patricide for good measure.
On “What If I Can’t Give You Anything But Love,” Costello wails about the end of an extramarital affair as his guitar crackles and screeches and the beat swings relentlessly on. The plaintive, piano-led “Paint the Red Rose Blue” casts a pitying but critical eye on a man whose egotism poisons his relationship with the woman he loves. The ache in Costello’s voice suggests he knows all too well how toxic guys can screw up good things.

“Mistook Me for a Friend” lightens the mood with its pounding beat and cheery organ line until you pay attention to lines like “I carry velvet gloves cause the blood gets on your hands.” The slinky R&B tune “My Most Beautiful Mistake” describes a woman whom the narrator can’t help but admire for seeing through him. On the surf-tinged “Magnificent Hurt,” Elvis Costello celebrates the pleasure-in-pain of lust over Nieve’s eerie organ and his own yowling guitar.
The loping, cabaret-inflected “The Man You Love to Hate” could describe what happens to the If-named boy once his chickens come home to roost. “Death of Magic Thinking” finds Costello once again picking up the pieces after a relationship dies. The lyrics might read dejected, but the lively Latin beat suggests that life goes on.

The lilting, spooky “Trick Out the Truth” lists monsters from Godzilla to Mussolini that await any who would seek meaning in this life. The Boy Named If ends with the wistful faux-nursery tale “Mr. Crescent,” which describes a down-and-out ne’er do well whose bad deeds leave him all alone. By closing with this song, Costello seems to imply that the world might not play fair, but you still need to walk the line. That’s a good lesson for the kids. For adults, too.
Last edited by sweetest punch on Wed Jan 12, 2022 2:43 pm, edited 2 times in total.
Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.
sweetest punch
Posts: 5961
Joined: Sat Apr 03, 2004 5:49 am
Location: Belgium

Re: The Boy Named If, new album by Elvis & The Imposters, January 14, 2022

Post by sweetest punch »

https://www.humo.be/muziek/elvis-costel ... ogle.be%2F

Google translation -


Elvis Costello: '2021 was a difficult year. But music always helps

Elvis Costello has to be the hardest working person in show business. Shortly afterwards, he released a few songs from his album 'Hey Clockface' from October 2020 in French on the EP 'La face de pendule à coucou', with Isabelle Adjani and Iggy Pop, among others. Since then we've also had 'The Spanish Model', featuring Spanish-speaking global stars doing their thing with 1978's 'This Year's Model', a deluxe vinyl edition of 1979's 'Armed Forces', and the awesomely funny podcast 'How to Play the Guitar & Y'. . Now, with the backing and compliments of his Imposters, there's 'The Boy Named If': its best for me in a long time, with the unbridled energy of an adolescent, while El himself is well past retirement age.

MARC COENEN
MONDAY, JANUARY 10, 2022

Whether 2021 was a year to never or just quickly forget: we asked the celebrated pop star, who held an audience via Zoom. Three quarters of the prepared questions went in the trash, because when Elvis starts talking, he is unstoppable. The first was therefore an insider.

HUMO How are you?
Elvis Costello (67) «Okay, thank you. A person has to keep busy, especially at my age, and for me that often means: making a record. In March 2020 I was on tour in England when corona broke out, after which I returned to Vancouver to be with my family. I almost finished one record, 'Hey Clockface', and most of the work was done on 'The Spanish Model' as well, but the guys in the band were eager to keep working. And so drummer Pete Thomas and I started a kind of distant musical dialogue.

»Drummers are always ready to make music, and before I knew it, we were exchanging notes about new songs. One thing led to another. I was at home in the garden, Pete in his basement with his drums, Steve ( Nieve , keyboard player and guitarist, ed. ) was in the countryside in France: despite that distance everything went very smoothly. The record took us even less time that way than if we had all been in one studio together. We understood each other perfectly and played with less embarrassment, I think. Probably because we couldn't see each other ( laughs ). Pete in particular was in great form, playing casual yet very disciplined.”

HUMO The conditions in which a plate is made also determine the quality. I remember once, when asked by Bruce Springsteen why 'My Aim Is True' sounded so special, you no doubt answered truthfully, 'No money.'
Costello ( laughs ) “That's definitely a factor, but luckily some of the songs were very simple and needed few arrangements, so we could record them individually in a very natural way. Others were more complicated, such as 'Trick Out the Truth' and 'The Death of Magic Thinking'. I've been recording with Steve Nieve for almost 45 years, but I can't remember ever feeling closer together, even though we only saw each other through a video link. It gave a lot of freedom to do our work.”

HUMO Hit me with your felt hat, but I feel like you actually wrote a concept record.
Costello «When you write a series of songs in a short period of time, sometimes it happens that your imagination focuses on a few themes, but that was certainly not the intention. They are songs that portray a certain period in life: when you leave childhood and become an adult, and all the stages in between. But that's not how the record was conceived in advance, I only realized that afterwards."

HUMO The title suggests that these are children's songs, but I don't have that feeling at all.
Costello «I tried to capture that dizzying feeling when you suddenly become a teenager . All those magical new things that happen to you and for which you are sometimes ashamed, while you don't really know why. You suddenly become very aware of your changing body, your ideas also change and suddenly everything is in jeopardy. You lose your self-confidence because you give yourself a self-image that is not correct.

»The last song on the record was written from the point of view of an elderly man who looks back on that time with shame and regret. After all, there are men who actually never grow up or mature, and I don't mean that in a positive way.

»When the record was ready, I got a message that it might not be possible to press vinyl because demand was outstripping supply and supplies were running out. I would have really liked that, because you should actually listen to this music together, not on your own via some stream. Then I thought: I'm not just making a record, but also a book with thirteen short stories, illustrations and videos. This gives you even more choice: something for everyone.”

HUMO You also made the music podcast 'How to Play the Guitar and Y', which can be heard on Audible.com. In your bio, you call yourself a "writer and part-time musician who made a number of records in the 20th century, some of which some remember." Do you really see yourself that way?
Costello " Actually, yes. I certainly don't play guitar every day and I wouldn't be able to play in another band: I'm just not good enough for that. I've learned to arrange and orchestrate and I can translate the music in my head for the musicians, but I don't practice an instrument every day. I do work with words every day. When I read the newspaper, I see phrases in titles that suggest a story that I can work with. I already did that as a child: at school I never normally answered questions from teachers. Why I still don't know: did I want to be contrarian or did I have too much imagination? I also believed in angels watching over me, thanks to my Catholic upbringing. No wonder it all went wrong later ( laughs ).

»In 'Penelope Halfpenny' I write about a teacher from that time who was not a good teacher at all: she was just a young woman who really didn't want to be in front of a class. That was fascinating, because she told us things that sometimes made no sense to us. But we learned more from that than from her lessons.”

HUMO Penelope could be straight out of Ricky Gervais' 'After Life'.
Costello «Many teachers did act, as if they were performing in class. They played a part. The first time I saw one outside the classroom in the greengrocer's store, I was very surprised that teachers also ate apples. But Penelope evoked a world I'd never heard of, and it really captivated me."

HUMO You write your website with your own hands full of fascinating stories from your life. When I read the posts of the last year, there are many about farewell. Friends who die, so does your mother. 2021 was not an easy year.
Costello «There was a period when I only wrote in memoriams. My friends Hal Willner and John Prine passed away on the same day in 2020, which was an incredibly difficult moment. Hal was a very good friend, I still think of him a lot. I tried to honor him by making 'Hey Clockface' sound the way he would have liked as a producer, not commercially. I would have loved to let him hear that record.

»The recordings of 'The Spanish Model' were a cheerful intermezzo, comfort in difficult times: the songs, which are already forty years old, were given a whole new impetus.

“The worst thing about my mother's death is that because of corona I couldn't be with her and take care of her when she got sick and eventually died. Most of the drawings for this record I made two years ago when I was in the hospital with her, after her first stroke. It doesn't matter what people think about those drawings, whether they are art or not. They were like a lightning rod for me. I waited for my mother to get better and luckily she still came, the children were still able to visit her. But there comes a time when life has exhausted you to the point where there is no salvation. No matter how strong you are, and my mother was a very strong woman.

»After my last tour, I went to England to tidy up her flat: that was a very melancholy moment, but it also gave me the chance to see what she had collected – things she thought were important, letters she had written and which I can now read myself. That's a consolation. I don't feel the need to bother people with those feelings in a song, it's something we all experience. I've had a lot of love and support from her, there's a lot of good that we can remember.”

HUMO You said that in those moments of mourning you had a hard time with some music.
Costello «I had trouble with the lyrics of some songs, they came very close to my grief and so I avoided them. I did discover fantastic new music because of that: Arooj Aftab , for example, who has Pakistani roots and has made a beautiful record, 'Vulture Prince'. She sings in a language I don't understand, that helped. Music always helps.

»My wife ( jazz singer Diana Krall , ed. ) will be touring again soon: there is nothing more beautiful than playing music with people around. And I hope I can come back to Belgium, I'm really looking forward to it.”

'The Boy Named If' is out January 14 on EMI.
Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.
sweetest punch
Posts: 5961
Joined: Sat Apr 03, 2004 5:49 am
Location: Belgium

Re: The Boy Named If, new album by Elvis & The Imposters, January 14, 2022

Post by sweetest punch »

Interview on Noise11.com:
https://youtu.be/3-yKS5_kswA
Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.
Hawksmoor
Posts: 625
Joined: Mon Jun 16, 2003 2:51 pm

Re: The Boy Named If, new album by Elvis & The Imposters, January 14, 2022

Post by Hawksmoor »

sweetest punch wrote:Interview on Noise11.com:
https://youtu.be/3-yKS5_kswA
Another corker of an interview. The stuff about Pete 'keeping his hand in' by playing along to records all day in his basement is just beautiful.
sweetest punch
Posts: 5961
Joined: Sat Apr 03, 2004 5:49 am
Location: Belgium

Re: The Boy Named If, new album by Elvis & The Imposters, January 14, 2022

Post by sweetest punch »

https://theriver107.com/elvis-costello- ... if-review/

ELVIS COSTELLO AND THE IMPOSTERS, ‘THE BOY NAMED IF’: REVIEW

ELVIS COSTELLO‘s nostalgic look-back lately has reignited his rock ‘n’ roll heart. From pre-pandemic tours zeroing in on specific eras to records that recall his late-’70s/early ’80s zenith to 2021’s reworking of THIS YEAR’S MODEL as a Spanish-language album, this spate of activity recalls a period before restless genre jumping became an occasionally frustrating norm.

On album No. 32, he’s back with the Imposters (essentially the classic Attractions lineup minus bassist Bruce Thomas, replaced by Davey Faragher), who were on board for 2020’s Hey Clockface, maybe his best album of the 21st century. The Boy Named If doesn’t sound all that different: The emphasis here is on gut-level rock ‘n’ roll stripped of the overthinking that often weighed down Costello collaborations with the Brodsky Quartet, Anne Sofie Von Otter and AND THE ROOTS over the decades.

Returned to his natural element, Costello zips through The Boy Named If‘s 13 tracks with the effortless and melodic poise that marked his earliest albums. There’s a bigger theme to the work – charting the uneasy moment a boy becomes a man – and the backstories concocted by Costello give the songs some perspective, but none of that is required to appreciate its immediate impact.

The opening “Farewell, OK” sets the style and pace – all slashing guitars, bouncing organ and a circa-1979 sneering vocal by Costello – as the title track levels the field with a less-straightforward approach (think TRUST‘s dream-echo languidness). A handful of detours, like the ballad “Paint the Red Rose Blue,” still manage to bring up the past through either lyrical nods or the streamlined nature inherent of the quartet working within familiar settings.

Even the zigzagging “What if I Can’t Give You Anything but Love” makes room for a brief, torrid guitar solo that Costello’s songs haven’t really had room for since he started making more complicated music in the ’90s. But The Boy Named If is at its best when the lines are direct – as they are in “Magnificent Hurt,” where Steve Nieve’s blanketing keyboard runs add just a touch of menace. It’s a throwback for sure but also completely in step with Costello’s recent creative renaissance. The result is his most relaxed, and satisfying, album in years.
Last edited by sweetest punch on Wed Jan 12, 2022 4:02 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.
sweetest punch
Posts: 5961
Joined: Sat Apr 03, 2004 5:49 am
Location: Belgium

Re: The Boy Named If, new album by Elvis & The Imposters, January 14, 2022

Post by sweetest punch »

https://www.puls24.at/news/entertainmen ... hen/253810

Elvis Costello lässt es mal wieder krachen
11. Jan 2022

Schon 67 soll dieser Mann sein? Man mag es kaum glauben, wenn man das vor jugendlicher Energie nur so sprühende neue Album von Elvis Costello hört. Auf "The Boy Named If" klingt er fast so rotzig wie in den späten 70er-Jahren. Damals hatte der Sänger mit dem gar nicht aufmüpfigen Äußeren als eine Art "King of Punk 'n' Roll" neben rauen Burschen wie Sex Pistols oder The Clash die Bühne betreten, um sich rasch zu einem der besten Songwriter der Pop-Historie zu entwickeln.

Nach dem Easy-Listening-Meisterstück "Look Now" (2018) und dem etwas unsteten "Hey Clockface" (2020) schlägt Costello erneut eine Volte - und legt eine der rauesten Powerpop-Platten seiner Karriere vor. Sie enthält in gut 50 Minuten Laufzeit 13 Lieder, auf denen er selbst - und erst recht der ob so viel verbaler Kraft verblüffte Hörer - kaum zum Atemholen kommt. Wenn schon Rückblick auf die eigene Jugend, dann so. Einige wenige ruhigere Stücke ("Paint The Red Rose Blue", "Mr. Crescent") sind auch dabei, aber insgesamt dominieren - angefangen beim krachigen "Farewell, OK" - mitreißende Uptempo-Sounds.

Costello, dessen nasale Stimme man schon immer mögen musste, singt also auf Top-Niveau. Er hat mit The Imposters aber auch eine Weltklasse-Band an der Seite - und ist sich dieses Privilegs bewusst. "Sie sind großartig, drei von uns haben ja seit 45 Jahren immer wieder zusammen gespielt", sagte er kürzlich dankbar. "Es gibt jedoch viele Bands, die lange miteinander gespielt haben und dabei vergessen haben, wie man einfach mal loslässt." Seine drei Begleiter - Steve Nieve an den Keyboards, Schlagzeuger Pete Thomas und Bassist Davey Faragher - seien weiterhin "tödlich" mit ihrer Virtuosität und Wucht.

Wer den Balladen-Crooner Costello bevorzugt, muss wohl auf ein Nachfolgealbum von "The Boy Named If" hoffen. Eine weitere Zusammenarbeit mit Sixties-Ikone Burt Bacharach, der bereits frühere Alben wie "Painted From Memory" (1998) und "Look Now" prägte, könnte aber schon bald das Licht der Pop-Welt erblicken. "Burt und ich waren im Sommer mit einem 30-köpfigen Orchester in den Capitol-Studios, um zwei neue Songs aufzunehmen", erzählte der Brite jüngst im "Guardian". "Er ist jetzt 93, und seine Intensität ist ungetrübt." Das kann man ganz sicher auch über Elvis Costello sagen.
———————
Google translation

Elvis Costello lets it rip again
11 Jan 2022

Is this man supposed to be 67 already? It's hard to believe when you hear Elvis Costello's new album, sparkling with youthful energy. On "The Boy Named If" it sounds almost as snotty as it was in the late 70s. At that time the singer with the not rebellious appearance had entered the stage as a kind of "King of Punk 'n' Roll" next to rough guys like Sex Pistols or The Clash in order to quickly develop into one of the best songwriters in pop history.

After the easy-listening masterpiece "Look Now" (2018) and the somewhat unsteady "Hey Clockface" (2020), Costello hit another volte - and presented one of the roughest power pop records of his career. It contains 13 songs in a running time of a good 50 minutes, on which he himself - and especially the listener, amazed by the amount of verbal power - can barely catch his breath. If you are looking back at your own youth, then this is it. A few quieter pieces ("Paint The Red Rose Blue", "Mr. Crescent") are also included, but overall - starting with the noisy "Farewell, OK" - rousing up-tempo sounds dominate.

Costello, whose nasal voice you have always had to like, sings at a top level. With The Imposters he also has a world-class band by his side - and is aware of this privilege. "You're great, three of us have played together again and again for 45 years," he said recently gratefully. "However, there are a lot of bands that have played together for a long time and have forgotten how to just let go." His three companions - Steve Nieve on keyboards, drummer Pete Thomas and bassist Davey Faragher - are still "deadly" with their virtuosity and force.

Those who prefer the ballad crooner Costello have to hope for a follow-up album to "The Boy Named If". Another collaboration with sixties icon Burt Bacharach, who had already shaped earlier albums such as "Painted From Memory" (1998) and "Look Now", could soon see the light of day in the pop world. "Burt and I were with a 30-piece orchestra in the Capitol Studios in the summer to record two new songs," the Briton recently told the Guardian. "He's 93 now, and his intensity is clear." You can certainly say the same about Elvis Costello.
Last edited by sweetest punch on Wed Jan 12, 2022 4:01 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.
sheeptotheslaughter
Posts: 762
Joined: Thu Nov 27, 2008 10:51 am

Re: The Boy Named If, new album by Elvis & The Imposters, January 14, 2022

Post by sheeptotheslaughter »

Hawksmoor wrote:
sheeptotheslaughter wrote:
Neil. wrote:Sounds like I need to give it another spin! Thanks for the thoughts, peeps.
As I have said on another topic this album has got to be the best promoted EC record in many a year in the UK. Two prime time TV performances at the very least. Norton is a coup.

It might even chart
I'm not sure 'charts' mean a lot these days. Unless you're Adele or Ed Sheeran, when the BBC can run a news story about how amazing it is that their new LP is 'Number One!' In its first week! So you better run out and buy it! How is that a news story and not free advertising, and who is in whose pocket?

Sorry - I'm being facetious. But I would argue that a 'chart placing' means nothing these days. The people who were always going to buy it will still buy it, and the ones who weren't...won't. But I totally agree that in terms of marketing this LP to the ones who were always going to buy it and to the ones who were probably going to buy it (but who don't automatically buy every Elvis LP), the promotion has been excellent.

And yes, agree entirely that, in terms of promoting your product, Norton is the most desirable gig on UK TV right now.
I know it doesnt mean much to us but Steve Nieve got very excited when Look now was number 7 in the midweek charts. I guess as a musician you still want your records to sell a few. If that is even a thing these days
sweetest punch
Posts: 5961
Joined: Sat Apr 03, 2004 5:49 am
Location: Belgium

Re: The Boy Named If, new album by Elvis & The Imposters, January 14, 2022

Post by sweetest punch »

https://www.smh.com.au/culture/music/el ... hN6TDysii0

Elvis Costello is my music idol. Could I meet him and keep my cool?

By Barry Divola
January 12, 2022

Most of the time I try to keep some semblance of professional distance when I’m interviewing someone. Even when that someone is Pete Townshend, Paul Weller, Joe Strummer or Lou Reed.

But this is different. It starts with a girl, as these stories often do. Specifically, an English girl I’d met in early 1978. We bonded over our love of the Beatles and Roxy Music, but she kept going on about some speccy dude named Elvis Costello. One Friday afternoon she handed me a bag containing his first two albums. “Listen and learn,” she said.

By Monday morning, I was a convert and a totally different person. I not only became besotted with Costello’s incredible wordplay (“like a chainsaw through a dictionary” as he’d later put it in song), his killer melodies and his nervy post-punk/new wave sound, but with the fact that he didn’t look anything like a rock star.

A wise man – it’s usually credited to David Lee Roth – once said that all music journalists love Elvis Costello because they all look like Elvis Costello. Give that man a trophy. I became a music journalist.

Today I play in a band called Radio Radio, named after a Costello song. Our repertoire contains a whole set of his songs, and I play a Fender Jazzmaster guitar because that’s what he’s holding on the cover of his debut album, 1977’s My Aim Is True.

Costello no doubt has to suffer bald middle-aged men salivating all over him and telling him they’re his greatest fan all the time. I’m too cool for that.

Actually, no, I’m not. Because as soon as we’re hooked up via Zoom to talk about his latest album, The Boy Named If, I relate all of the above to him in the opening minute of our conversation. He kindly doesn’t run for the nearest exit, says he’s flattered, and then starts talking about his own teenage fandom for Nick Lowe, the man who would go on to produce Costello’s first five albums.

“You could go up to his band, Brinsley Schwarz, in a bar and introduce yourself to them,” he recalls. “They had success, but they weren’t inaccessible and living on a cloud. They were very down-to-earth, regular guys. That always stuck with me.”

He remembers deciding at the age of 17 that he wanted to be a songwriter for the rest of his life, “but I mostly auditioned for publishers, not record companies because, well, look”. He points to his face and offers a wry smile. “This is a face that’s not very obviously a pop star. It’s a face for radio, as they say.”

Costello’s two defining characteristics over the years have been stylistic restlessness and breathless productivity. Although he was signed to the punk-era Stiff label and became a new wave icon, he quickly veered in different directions, from the country of 1981’s Almost Blue to 1980’s soul-infused Get Happy!! Later he collaborated with artists as diverse as the Brodsky Quartet, Burt Bacharach, Allen Toussaint and Paul McCartney.

Even at 67, he’s never been a heritage act who relies on his back catalogue. And while many artists have lamented a creative stasis during COVID, Costello’s last 18 months have been a flurry of activity. In March 2020, he cut a tour short and retreated to a holiday cabin on Vancouver Island with his wife, jazz singer Diana Krall, and his twin sons, Dexter and Frank, who recently turned 15.

And he got down to work. He released his 31st album, Hey Clockface, in October last year. This year he recorded a 96-minute spoken word piece for Audible called How to Play the Guitar and Y. Although he does discuss the guitar and the horrors of learning the F-chord, it’s actually a rumination on the nature of music itself, and he emphasises the importance of treating it as a joyous thing that connects us with the innocence and willingness to experiment that we had as children.

As well as working on a mammoth deluxe edition of 1979’s Armed Forces album, which includes many live recordings from the era, including the infamous 1978 “Riot at the Regent” concert in Sydney when a cranky Costello quit the stage less than an hour into the show, he collaborated with Hispanic artists to make Spanish Model, an inventive reimagining of 1978’s This Year’s Model.

And this week Costello releases The Boy Named If. His 32nd record is a concept album of sorts about the uneasy journey from childhood to adulthood. It’s his rockiest record in some time and remarkably cohesive considering he and the members of his band, the Imposters, recorded their parts separately in three different countries – Canada, the United States and France. He also wrote a short story and created a picture (under his artistic pseudonym, Eamon Singer) to accompany each track, which will be included in a limited-edition book.

He has suffered setbacks of late. His beloved mother died in January at the age of 93. “The last time I saw her was when she attended opening night of my last tour in Liverpool. So I’m now the senior member of my family.”

Three years ago he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, “but I don’t use words like cancer battle or survivor because I’ve lost many close friends who had mortal fights with the disease, and I had successful surgery that meant I avoided serious illness”.

Talk turns to his late father, Ross McManus, a trumpeter and big band vocalist who had a Top 20 hit in Australia in 1970 with a cover of the Beatles’ The Long and Winding Road, under the name Day Costello. Costello recalls going to the movies in Leicester Square with his dad that year to see the Beatles documentary Let It Be. Father and son both walked out depressed.

“I was watching my favourite group breaking up before my eyes,” Costello says. “So, getting to see the new Peter Jackson documentary series was such a joyful experience. It was wonderful to see the most famous group in the world do what everybody does in music, which is to will something into existence by singing nonsense words or changing the tempo and not having any self-consciousness about that. I deliberately watched the series slowly because I didn’t want it to end.”

He shakes his head and rubs the stubble on his chin.

“And then after going through all that to make Let It Be, they were able to go on and make Abbey Road,” he says. “Just incredible, right?”

A fan is a fan, it seems, even if your name is Elvis Costello.

The Boy Named If is out on January 14.
Last edited by sweetest punch on Wed Jan 12, 2022 3:56 pm, edited 2 times in total.
Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.
sweetest punch
Posts: 5961
Joined: Sat Apr 03, 2004 5:49 am
Location: Belgium

Re: The Boy Named If, new album by Elvis & The Imposters, January 14, 2022

Post by sweetest punch »

krm wrote:
Hawksmoor wrote:
sweetest punch wrote: It’s sold out in the American store ( https://shop.elviscostello.com/products ... ck-book-cd ), still available in UK store ( https://shopuk.elviscostello.com/).
Yeah, I'm UK-based.
Still available in the German store as well - https://store.udiscover-music.de/p51-i0 ... index.html
CD-book is available again in US-store: https://shop.elviscostello.com/products ... ck-book-cd
Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.
sweetest punch
Posts: 5961
Joined: Sat Apr 03, 2004 5:49 am
Location: Belgium

Re: The Boy Named If, new album by Elvis & The Imposters, January 14, 2022

Post by sweetest punch »

Interview with Rolling Stone Deutschland: https://youtu.be/oW91_pghKWs
Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.
sweetest punch
Posts: 5961
Joined: Sat Apr 03, 2004 5:49 am
Location: Belgium

Re: The Boy Named If, new album by Elvis & The Imposters, January 14, 2022

Post by sweetest punch »

https://ultimateclassicrock.com/elvis-c ... um-review/

Elvis Costello and the Imposters, ‘The Boy Named If': Album Review

Elvis Costello's nostalgic look-back lately has reignited his rock 'n' roll heart. From pre-pandemic tours zeroing in on specific eras to records that recall his late-'70s/early '80s zenith to 2021's reworking of This Year's Model as a Spanish-language album, this spate of activity recalls a period before restless genre jumping became an occasionally frustrating norm.

On album No. 29, he's back with the Imposters (essentially the classic Attractions lineup minus bassist Bruce Thomas, replaced by Davey Faragher), who were on board for 2018's Look Now, his best album of the 21st century. The Boy Named If doesn't sound all that different: The emphasis here is on gut-level rock 'n' roll stripped of the overthinking that often weighed down Costello collaborations with the Brodsky Quartet, Anne Sofie Von Otter and and the Roots over the decades.

Returned to his natural element, Costello zips through The Boy Named If's 13 tracks with the effortless and melodic poise that marked his earliest albums. There's a bigger theme to the work – charting the uneasy moment a boy becomes a man – and the backstories concocted by Costello give the songs some perspective, but none of that is required to appreciate its immediate impact.

The opening "Farewell, OK" sets the style and pace – all slashing guitars, bouncing organ and a circa-1979 sneering vocal by Costello – as the title track levels the field with a less-straightforward approach (think Trust's dream-echo languidness). A handful of detours, like the ballad "Paint the Red Rose Blue," still manage to bring up the past through either lyrical nods or the streamlined nature inherent of the quartet working within familiar settings.

Even the zigzagging "What if I Can't Give You Anything but Love" makes room for a brief, torrid guitar solo that Costello's songs haven't really had room for since he started making more complicated music in the '90s. But The Boy Named If is at its best when the lines are direct – as they are in "Magnificent Hurt," where Steve Nieve's blanketing keyboard runs add just a touch of menace. It's a throwback for sure but also completely in step with Costello's recent creative renaissance. The result is his most relaxed, and satisfying, album in years.
Last edited by sweetest punch on Wed Jan 12, 2022 3:55 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.
sweetest punch
Posts: 5961
Joined: Sat Apr 03, 2004 5:49 am
Location: Belgium

Re: The Boy Named If, new album by Elvis & The Imposters, January 14, 2022

Post by sweetest punch »

https://twitter.com/ElvisCostello/statu ... 4350946305

Visit Elvis Costello’s store for a chance to win the signed 88-page hardback storybook edition of ‘The Boy Named If’ and an exclusive signed 7 inch. Open to US & UK residents only. https://elvis-costello.lnk.to/VinylComp

Image
Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.
sweetest punch
Posts: 5961
Joined: Sat Apr 03, 2004 5:49 am
Location: Belgium

Re: The Boy Named If, new album by Elvis & The Imposters, January 14, 2022

Post by sweetest punch »

Fragment of Ronnie Scott’s : 2 hours of being inside the mind of Steve Nieve
https://fb.watch/auVE2v6uk2/
Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.
taramasalata
Posts: 75
Joined: Tue Jul 24, 2007 3:15 pm
Location: switzerland

Re: The Boy Named If, new album by Elvis & The Imposters, January 14, 2022

Post by taramasalata »

sweetest punch wrote:Interview with Rolling Stone Deutschland: https://youtu.be/oW91_pghKWs
While still being unusually reluctant to fall in love with the 3 songs that have already been released (and I really would wish to!
"OK Farewell" being a perfectly appropriate kick in the arse of 2020-song when being released on New Year's Eve 12 months ago...and being more quickly forgotten than that damn year :cry:, never thought it would reappear as the opening song of his next record), I'm very curious about TBNI, the more so when reading all these rave reviews from all over the world.

But what a kind, sensitive, heartwarming interview!

We all know that sometimes he can be a bit lengthy ... especially in interviews, when he keeps talking on and on.. incessantly.
But we know too that it can be fascinating to listen to his thoughts evolve, let him put them in well-chosen, precise words, sometimes sharp as a chainsaw, other times tender as a rose.

And this interview is one of these treasures: Among all this promotion routine, he's still capable in letting himself touch (and touch us listeners) by going back through his life, by talking about first guitar chords, about painting on a tablet computer in company of his mother's agony, about Pete's drumming the new beats on his old Gretsch kit down in the basement and and
and, still in 2022, calling a great ABBA tune a great ABBA tune when there is a surprisingly great new one.

Talking as intimate as we would be sitting with him in his living room.

And in the next moment saying goodbye to the interviewer as professionally as ever with a routinely "see you next time".

This guy is so full of spirit, passion, dedication, life, LOVE, it's amazing.

While I always had admired him for his way with words, I love him nowadays even more so for not having to use them (sometimes) as a defense to but as an embrace of the world.
He really seems to have becoming quite a happy person, very much at ease with his life and its offerings.
User avatar
DeathWearsABigHat
Posts: 145
Joined: Tue Mar 29, 2005 5:05 pm
Location: Cheshire, UK
Contact:

Re: The Boy Named If, new album by Elvis & The Imposters, January 14, 2022

Post by DeathWearsABigHat »

sweetest punch wrote:Interview (part 1) in The New Cue: https://thenewcue.substack.com/p/the-ne ... r-20-elvis
Anyone able to share this interview in some way for those of us that aren't subscribers?
"trust the wizards, here we go" http://www.trustthewizards.com
Teresa the Waitress
Posts: 61
Joined: Wed Dec 08, 2021 1:43 am

Re: The Boy Named If, new album by Elvis & The Imposters, January 14, 2022

Post by Teresa the Waitress »

Thank you for posting the Rollling Stone interview, it is excellent, I found it very moving especially at the end when he is talking about 3 generations of his family, and the story of his great grandfather going into an orphanage, and how to this day he sees what he does as his work and works at what he does.
sweetest punch
Posts: 5961
Joined: Sat Apr 03, 2004 5:49 am
Location: Belgium

Re: The Boy Named If, new album by Elvis & The Imposters, January 14, 2022

Post by sweetest punch »

DeathWearsABigHat wrote:
sweetest punch wrote:Interview (part 1) in The New Cue: https://thenewcue.substack.com/p/the-ne ... r-20-elvis
Anyone able to share this interview in some way for those of us that aren't subscribers?
Start The Week With… Elvis Costello

Paul Stokes compiled an Elvis playlist for you to listen to while you read their conversation. Allow him to explain its concept…

The Elvis Costello you ‘want’ according to Elvis Costello*
*using his system

In 2013, Elvis compiled a list of 500 albums worthy of your ears for Vanity Fair. Rather than provide track suggestions per record, Costello advised: “When in doubt, play Track 4 - it is usually the one you want”. I wondered how this methodology might work when applied to Costello’s own body work… and the results are incredibly decent. Some old favourites, a few big singles and plenty of overlooked, hidden gems have been lurking four songs in across Costello’s career. So here is Track 4 from every Elvis album in order of release to date, you know you want it…

Before we start, I went to the shops this morning. I didn't even think about until I got there, but the shop is in what used to be the Hoover Factory on the Western Avenue, which you wrote a track about…
Oh my goodness you live up that way? That used to be my route to work when I lived out in Cranford. I'd go by it every day, I suppose the song [Clubland] came in my head. I passed it the other day on the way to the airport because I was in England for a few days and it still looks splendid. I'm glad they didn't knock it down. Do they still make Hoovers? I guess Dyson kind of made that a bit dicey. Is it a shop now?

Yes, it's a supermarket and some posh flats.
Something like that happened up in North Action, I think. I used to work for Elizabeth Arden, it was an office with a factory next door. We actually had a company store like it says in Sixteen Tons where you could get cheap make-up. But for the grace of God, I might have been glam rock! Some cheap mascara and a bit of rouge it could have been a whole different story!

Last time I spoke to you, before Hey Clockface came out just over a year ago, you'd said you'd almost given up on the album format and were going to drop tracks individually, before changing your mind. Now you have new album The Boy Named If out 15 months later. You still love the album, don’t you?
There are some realities to that. What I didn't want to let on then, was that we had been working on Spanish Model [This Year’s Model with Latin artists singing over the original tapes] for about three years. So many of the people brought in such great adaptations, all sorts of new ideas. That was the joy of it.

We were excited to put that out, and then we were told, 'Well, now' the economy in Latin America particularly – where we were hoping this would introduce me, frankly, to some people that never heard my name – it just wasn't the time, because everybody's really understandably, very, very concerned. And that was true of everything. So the direct release of the songs that I had recorded for Hey Clockface did seem like the right way to go. But by the time we actually assemble those songs into Hey Clockface, I'd already started scheming this record.

Ha!
It did seem a bit wild to be doing so many things, but in the absence of being able to go on the stage and play directly to people, you don't just want to sit there and feel sorry for yourself. I certainly didn't want to and I sensed in [Attractions and Imposters drummer] Pete Thomas the need to play. He practices for hours every day. And of course, when there's no new music, he's playing along with records so he said to me 'I've got through all the records I love. I know exactly how to play Fire by Jimi Hendrix, I Heard It Through The Grapevine by Otis and Rain by The Beatles, what else can you give me?' And I said, 'How about this?' I don't know which song it was now, but one of the up-tempo songs. And after that, it was really just a just adjusting your state of mind to the fact that when you're in the studio, you're often put in boxes of your own for reasons of clarity. So what's the difference if you're 1000s of miles apart, so long as the moment in which you're doing your performance for the song is completely committed?

How difficult was it organising sessions via video calls?
The point is, you're not always looking over somebody's shoulder in the studio. And we didn't actually even link up visually, like we are now, very often because I found it sort of inhibited people. One day I was talking over one of the songs with Pete and then I went to the shops. When I came back, he'd done the part, but he'd done it very freely. It sounded like a performance as if we had played it in the room, whereas when I was watching him, I could see him being more analytical. But we did have two incredible hours over one of the songs. I think it was The Man You Love To Hate, which is very much led by Steve Nieve [Attractions and Imposters keyboards]. It's sort of this vaudeville story, so he's playing all the fairground, Wurlitzer organ type of stuff on his piano. And it was a real glimpse, because I don't normally get to do that. I hear what Steve plays but I was watching going, 'That will never work' and then he played another part, almost like an orchestra, and even after all these years Steve still has the ability to completely startle me. Sometimes the first statement he makes sounds like 'How did you arrive at that?', and then he'll do something much more fundamental, and the two things will glue together. I loved doing it this way. It was brand new to us. So of course it had that excitement to it that you don't always get, particularly when you're going okay, 'We've done a lot of rock and roll records. How are we going to make that be surprising to even to us and a surprise anybody else?'

The record has the subtitle of … And Other Childhood Stories. Was the idea inspired by being with your sons in that lockdown period and comparing what they could and couldn’t do with what you could at that age?
I never thought about the lockdown. My main concern, to be really honest, and I'm not being sentimental here, was about not being able to see my eldest son, who lives in London, and perhaps even more urgently, my mother whose was 93, and had for the last two years been gradually emerging from a major stroke. As you would at that age, she had a lot of health issues and a series of crises, which unhappily concluded with her passing in January – and I wasn't able to visit her again.

So I didn't really give any thought to the things I could and couldn't do, like, ‘Can I go to the shops? Can I walk down the road?’ So I got busy. In terms of my daily work, I was very busy, communicating with my colleagues. I had that one anxiety that I worried about my family elsewhere. I worried about friends and I lost a couple of friends, so then it became a very immediate thing. But frankly, I didn't have time for those events to filter into song. Songs were already formed enough with these thoughts that had been in my mind. I think I knew that The Boy Named If was a story because it moves in time throughout the song. It starts with the child saying, “it wasn't me, it was my imaginary friend that broke that”, you know, to the same kind of pitiful excuse that a grown man would make for bad behaviour.

I suppose the other song that could have been the title of the record was The Death Of Magic Thinking, because it is the departure from that blissful state of innocence and imagination that is childhood, and along come all the other anxieties. As you say, the anxieties my 14 soon to be 15 year old boys have are a whole different bunch than I had at that age. Not just because of these current circumstances, but because the world is very different in lots of different ways. And there are lots of good things as well that are different to my youth. I just didn't think any record company would put out a record called The Death Of Magic Thinking! It's actually a sort of celebration, or at least an acknowledgement that there is that moment where you don't know these things, particularly about the carnal, and people can exert influence. Not in any sinister way, but just a petty power. There are a lot of songs that are expressing really quite grievous experiences, and I thought that maybe there was the need for one that... I always try to look for the angle that nobody else is covering, you know? I wanted to write the one that didn't so much say, 'oh, well this happened to me in reverse', so much as there is this moment of swirling intensity as you leave childhood and you start to recognise there are these things you can't control: your desires, the changes of your body. That's the very nature of the unpredictable, The Magnificent Hurt of desire. So I found myself talking to myself on the page about these things and they seem to want to hang together.

So it became an album which will be accompanied by a series of illustrated short stories written and drawn by you?
That little jump to giving it that subtitle and then making a physical reality of the storybook was in response to the fact that I wanted a centre to this story. I didn't want it to be a bucket of mackerel run into the stream and swept away in a moment. I wanted an object, but there was no vinyl availability. When we first planned on releasing the record – we were going to bring the record out slightly earlier – there was no vinyl to be had. I mean, you could do press it on shellac but we cannot wipe out some more innocent living creatures, so I said, 'Well, look, this is a series of portraits and snapshots of these moments from childhood through early youth to an old scoundrel looking back on his disgraceful days. Why don't I actually turn the story into reality?' And I wrote these short stories, to amplify the ideas of the songs. In some cases the background to the songs, in some cases the foreground of the song or the preceding scene that led to the song or the concluding scene after the last note. Whichever it was, it is up to you if you care to read it. And I illustrated it, within my way. I am not putting myself on any pedestal as an artist, but I do see the pictures the way I do, they're intended to come out of the imagination raw. Some of them are quite upsetting, some of them are funny, some of them are quirky, some of them are memories, some of them are portraits and some of them are feeling just like the songs. It all seemed to be something that I hadn't done before. I’ve written a book before, but I hadn't written this short story book. I've talked about doing this for years and years, but this set of songs seem to marry with that notion quite well.

Talking of the of the book, and the pictures in particular, you spoke about how paintings and images inspired you when you did 6 Music with Tom Robinson last year, when your song Rocking Horse Road from Brutal Youth was played...
You see the story in a frame of something, and it's not really the story the artist intended, but it's the one you make up. It's like when you hear a song, you sometimes make up a scenario because you miss hear the lyrics or something and you kind of think that's about something quite different, particularly with songs that are deliberately a little bit opaque. I mean, I've tried to write every way: very, very plain spoken, very direct, very from the heart, very much from your conscious, a sense of some right or wrong that you might write in. And also I play, in a more painterly way, with words and images and leave it to the listener to kind of assemble them in a way that excites them. That's not just being vague, because I can definitely write the other way! I'm choosing to do that. The writers I admire also do that, just like painters I like. And filmmakers use similar techniques too. They dislocate time don't they? Particularly in film. Going back to the origin of how this record was physically made, I never really think about the joins in the mix or the process of recording because we accept it. When people first saw trains coming towards them in the cinema, they ran out in fear, didn't they? Now we accept people walking through the door, but we also accept jump cuts, disconnects of time and flashbacks and all these complex things that play with the psychology of the storytelling. And you can do that in songs! It is just a much more compressed form in songs.

Were there any pictures that inspired both the songs and your pictures for this album and the book?
Not really. For Brutal Youth I was actually spending a lot of time in some very renowned galleries, but the pictures that I found myself focusing on were not the most famous images in all art history. There were there were just things that spoke to me and little images within songs I could I could attribute to having an afternoon in front of that canvass. I had no idea of knowing whether Ensor or Caravaggio, or whoever it was, intended for me to write that line, but that's what I took away just like an art critic would have his interpretation of it. Theirs would be much more learned, but it wouldn't necessarily be a new thought, it would be a thought in response to understanding all of the code of that picture. I wasn't pretending I could do that.

No.
So with these [new] images, I mean, they are daubs. There's no pretence to them being at that elevated level. They're cartoons or whatever you call it, but I will say there is a very emotional continuity to my decision to start doing that. There is a family element. There are certain things that pertain to when I was a boy, and I'm considering things that I'm watching other people go through now I've reached this particular point where there's less road ahead than behind. When my mother had the stroke, I spent a lot of time sitting next to her hospital bed. It's different with a neurological condition, because it's not like, ’the heart will work to this extent now'. It's such a complex set of wires and having gone through with my grandmother and with my father's Parkinson's, I know there were many unpredictable things in cognition. I was told that my mother would never ever say any words that were not what they call courtesy words, when you repeat back – ‘Would you like cup of tea?’ ‘Yes!' Obviously, you learn that response from repetition. I was told it would never be more cohesive than that. But that just wasn't true, and I saw it in glimpses. So you can't play the guitar to somebody in a hospital bed, there's other people on the ward, so I found it very, very comforting to draw. Because it was something I feel I didn't have a great ability for – and I couldn’t bring an easel in – but I discovered the iPad and this electric pencil. It was self-contained and I could cheat just like you can in the studio, you know?

Using the technology?
You could achieve these effects that it would take years art college and study to learn. Techniques of layering and different types of brush or pencil. All the mediums that this pencil imitates is rather the same as having a box of samples of great drum sounds. It didn't feel dishonest. I started with it, subverting album covers, noir posters and pulp novels for the Imperial Bedroom tour, because I wanted to carry [artist/designer] Barney Bubble's characters. He did this painting for the cover of Imperial Bedroom, which I have on my wall here and I love so much, because it surprised me so much when he did the reveal in the studio. I went 'That's our record?! I thought it was all bright and cheerful, because it's got a harpsichord on it, isn't it a summer kind of feel good record? Why is this woman naked in with this sort of strange man with a pipe? What is going on?' I was completely astonished that he, of course, had seen right through the facade of all the Baroque music, into what was actually a very melancholic record.

When you're working on something, you often don't recognise it until you step back from the page. When you've locked yourself in Air Studios for six weeks with [producer] Geoff Emerick and a big bag of grass, you're entitled to get too close. That doesn't mean it isn't good music, but it does mean your definition of it is faulty. And of course, Barney saw it immediately. So I wanted to lift his little motifs from his painting and basically deface all my other record sleeves with references to it because that tour. And that led to this [book]. It's not more important than [the record], 6000 people that will see the pictures if they buy all of them. There are 6000, I signed them all and they're numbered. I suppose some people will say, 'I can't get that'. Well, your life will not end if you don't see it, but you might have another view of these songs that you might enjoy if you have that curiosity. Both things are true.

Part 2:

Your new album The Boy Named If is in a large part is inspired by the moment childhood begins to end and adulthood starts. One of its songs, Penelope Halfpenny, is inspired by somebody who taught you at school – a former crime reporter who you thought might be a spy. Tell me more!
Well, it's based on this person. I mean, my memory is this was a teacher who passed through our lives, briefly. Somebody hearing the song might think it's kind of objectifying, but that isn't it. It isn't hot for teacher – isn't there a song called that? – it isn't that. What I think it was, was that we were old enough to recognise that, maybe for the first time in my experience, and bear in mind I was taught in junior school by nuns. So you didn't know what age they were, they were sexless – they were supposed to be. Then I went to secondary school and it was a little bit different, but still most of the teachers were of an indeterminate age. You couldn't detect their ages because they were covered in chalk dust. They didn't have this obvious modern personality, like people we'd see in a magazine or on television. Then into our lives at that moment when these curiosities were emerging comes this woman who really, as I described in the song, seemed to have stumbled into a life of teaching on her way to some other career. That's what I remember, because she talked in a distracted way about other aspects of her life that had nothing to do with the lessons.

So I think the lesson was really: 'There's another world through a door that this person has and will inhabit, and won't it be great when we get to go there?' And it was sexy, but not because she was sexy, but because the whole idea of going into the adult world and going to a party in Knightsbridge was a thrilling notion. It was a thrilling notion in the abstract, you had no idea what that would feel like or how to get there – did you even have enough bus fare? Obviously I've romanticised it in the telling of the story. 'She disappeared, like the dot of a decimal place', That puts it in time. But I enjoyed it because the writing was joyful. I had this idea, I wanted major key, bright, guitar-driven songs for a part of the record because the Hey Clockface songs were minor key ballads for the most part. Very beautifully played by the French ensemble, and I'm very proud of those songs, but you don't want do the same thing again. I've never tried to do that. So I got in this frame of mind and it seemed to go. I wasn't making my tone poem or concept record, but the songs did seem to quickly talk to one another, maybe because they were written in a fairly short space of time and your mind is circling around certain things.

Having been drawn to that stage of life, when you took that step back from the canvass, so to speak, did you feel you'd revisited areas with a new perspective that you perhaps covered in the moment when you were actually that age? Were there new takes on familiar snapshots?
Yeah, I suppose that you could say that. I mean, you could draw a line from an observation in passing from Men Called Uncle from Get Happy – that jumps into my mind, for some reason – to Mistook Me For A Friend.

That sense of being some age in your early 20s, and you're in a strange town, and all your allegiances, friendships and love affairs are all, to say the least, questionable and probably transitory. That's the point of it, it's the thrilling chaos of it. You go somewhere and you don't know who's talking behind your back, who's complimenting you. It's an experience that you have if you're going through any sort of art scene. Suddenly it's all about you or not about you at all, and there's a moment when you sort of see your own reflection. Well, isn't that the same song as This Year's Girl? It's just from a different point of view. And I had this strange experience this year of hearing some of those songs I wrote when I was 23 sung back to me in another language, in another gender!

This is Spanish Model, which features Latin artists singing their takes and covers over the original This Year’s Model tapes. There must have been an experience for you?
Cami's La Chica De Hoy [Camila Gallardo's take on This Year's Girl] kind of reverses the gaze. Several of the songs do that on Spanish Model. The ones sung by women particularly really flipped, like Raquel Sofia's version of Chelsea. It's just interesting to hear them turned around in that way. I won't say it had any real influence [on The Boy Named If] because Spanish Model was pretty much ready to be released, though its influence on this is that I think I did really enjoy listening to the Attractions' parts, and appreciating how – due to all the single-minded purpose we had in that brief moment – we didn't know enough to fuck it up! It was that first six months [of the band] when we recorded This Year's Model, and I'm not saying we didn't make some great records after that, but that is as cohesive as anybody can play. Frightening, really!

The thing about Spanish Model is the newer mix wasn't made to get on Radio 1. Roger Bechirian's original mix was made to be a pop record in England – it was supposed to compete with ABBA, and it did! When Sebastian [Krys, Spanish Model producer] mixed it, he did it around different types of singer, some of them with lighter voices, some of them much more melodious voices than me. So he had the access to all of the untapped power of the Attractions' performances. Even though I don't get along with Bruce [Thomas, Attractions bassist], you can't beat the playing he does on that, he just couldn't have played on this new record. It's just not in his field. His skill is a different one and there's nothing the matter with that. I’ve worked with some of the greatest bass players who have ever picked up the instrument, you know, sometimes for one session, sometimes in a band for a couple of years: Jerry Scheff, Ray Brown, Paul McCartney, Dennis Crouch, you know, these are all the best players that you could get – so is Davey [Farragher, of current band The Imposters]. They're all different. How lucky for me? I mean, you don't want to just have one meal your whole life, you don't want the sky to be entirely one shade of blue.

You are very adamant that when you start a record you want it to be different each time, aren’t you?
Yeah! One of the things that's hardest to explain is when you do things that are a little unexpected because of the dominance in musical commentary of an orthodox view of rock that's forgotten all about its origins as a subversive force. Subversive, socially, politically and sexually. Because if you take the roll out, and you just got this squared dull thing. Syncopation is everything that made early rock n roll so thrilling, and all the people that we love from the 60s all still understood that. I think we still feel some of those things, but some contemporary bands don't. They lay it down very square, and it doesn't feel. People say ‘What are your favourite new records?' And you usually don't hear me quoting new rock releases. I just don't respond to them, because there's so much other great stuff – and I'm not been perverse. There's just so much other great music from all over the place. And some of it in languages I don't even understand. That doesn't even hold you back because you hear the joy, the human voice in it. You know, it's about something!

At the risk of sounding a cliche, with all these different albums at the moment you seem to be on a roll...
Well, I want to hold on to the roll as long as I can! Yeah, yeah. I mean, I do! I went see Bob Dylan last night, he was doing mostly the songs on the new record, so it was just a wonderful mood, and it's incredible songs. Then when they were playing the rhythmic songs, I was thinking, 'Wow, this is like an ancient language, it sounds like a Muddy Waters band!' Not because it's blues, but because of the how odd it all was. The average band trying to play blues is really boring. This was really very ancient and modern, at the same time, because everything landing kind of seems like it's on the wrong foot for a split second. It's just great to hear somebody talking in that language.

Someone thinking about how the songs are put together?
Arranging is under-appreciated. When every record was written down before they were recorded, people like Quincy Jones did these great swing records, but he also did Lesley Gore, all these wonderful pop records. They used to have to have those people, Ivor Raymonde and people like that, who produced Dusty before she went to America. There was some great arrangers and you hear those records and you go 'Wow, they did those with everybody in the room all at once'. I did that this summer. I went to Los Angeles, the first time I went back to the studio was actually to record two songs with a 30-piece orchestra and rhythm section with Burt Bacharach. That's a different ride! To be in the room in Capitol where all these incredible records were made, and you're in the booth and you're trying to hit every cue so you to don’t put somebody off. Amazing! Burt telling us where we're going wrong, with every little nuance of the music under his gaze. It was a thing I'll never ever forget.

Wow, amazing...
Yeah, I know! When he walked in, I hadn't seen him for a couple years and he's 93 I think, but I didn't even think about that. Once he got settled, next thing I looked out of the booth and I'm parallel to the mixer and I saw he was standing over it with his hands on the board looking at the score, and I thought, 'Now I'm in trouble! He's going to tell me what I'm not doing right.' And sure enough [does Burt's voice] 'You're not quite singing the right note there in bar six...'. It was thrilling and chastening at the same time.

And he's Burt Bacharach, what are you going to say?
Right! Senior musicians have seen everything but they gave him a standing ovation in the studio. There was no other reason but the love for him because it wasn't for affect. This was purely just because they loved it and he was very loving to them as well. It gave you hope.
Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.
sweetest punch
Posts: 5961
Joined: Sat Apr 03, 2004 5:49 am
Location: Belgium

Re: The Boy Named If, new album by Elvis & The Imposters, January 14, 2022

Post by sweetest punch »

https://www.standaard.be/cnt/dmf20220111_98073647

De jongensjaren van Costello

ELVIS COSTELLO
The boy named IF
4 sterren (van de 5)

Deze titel wordt een quizklassieker! Het 32ste album van Elvis Costello gaat over de ‘imaginary friend’ die we allemaal nodig hadden toen we jong waren, om onze stommiteiten op af te schuiven. Costello neemt in dertien nieuwe songs afscheid van zijn jonge jaren, en zo te horen waren die gevuld met forse emoties over schaamte, ontrouw, verlies en zelfs een moord. Ook de atypische juffrouw Penelope weekte wat los. Titels als ‘Mis-took me for a friend’ en ‘Magnificent hurt’ drukken de tegengestelde emoties uit die eigen zijn aan de periode. Met zijn Imposters keert Costello af en toe vrolijk terug naar de krachtige sound van zijn beginjaren, inclusief Steve Nieve op zijn doordringende Vox-orgel. Tegelijk is hij al 46 jaar bezig en kan hij niet zomaar een ‘jonge’ plaat maken: hoe hoekig, stomend en rauw sommige songs dus ook klinken, ze zitten vol fijne hooks en gouden melodietjes, en het fraai gearrangeerde ‘Trick out the truth’ mag meteen bijgezet worden in zijn al lange lijst klassiekers. Op zijn 67ste is bezig baasje Costello nog lang niet versleten (er komt ook een musical uit). Dit album verschijnt ook met een boek, dat de songteksten uitwerkt in 13 geïllustreerde verhalen.

————————
Google translation:

Costello's Boyhood

ELVIS COSTELLO
The boy named IF
4 stars (out of 5)

This title is going to be a quiz classic! Elvis Costello's 32nd album is about the "imaginary friend" we all needed when we were young, to blame our stupidities on. Costello bids farewell to his younger years in thirteen new songs, and it sounds like they were filled with strong emotions about shame, infidelity, loss and even murder. The atypical Miss Penelope also loosened up a bit. Titles such as 'Mis-took me for a friend' and 'Magnificent hurt' express the opposing emotions typical of the period. With his Imposters, Costello occasionally returns cheerfully to the powerful sound of his early years, including Steve Nieve on his penetrating Vox organ. At the same time, he has been working for 46 years and he cannot just make a 'young' record: however angular, steamy and raw some songs may sound, they are full of fine hooks and golden melodies, and the beautifully arranged 'Trick out the truth'. may immediately be added to his already long list of classics. At 67, busy owner Costello is far from worn out (a musical is also coming out). This album also comes with a book, which elaborates the lyrics into 13 illustrated stories.
Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.
sweetest punch
Posts: 5961
Joined: Sat Apr 03, 2004 5:49 am
Location: Belgium

Re: The Boy Named If, new album by Elvis & The Imposters, January 14, 2022

Post by sweetest punch »

https://www.parool.nl/kunst-media/rake- ... ~b80df62c/

Rake muzikale stompen en schoppen van Elvis Costello

Een enkele malen wild aangeslagen gitaar en dan meteen, bam, zang en drums erin, allebei ook al zo onstuimig. Bij de zo veelzijdige Elvis Costello is het per album altijd even afwachten wat je als luisteraar nu weer krijgt voorgeschoteld, maar op The Boy Named If, zijn 26ste (!) studio-album, is het in een klap duidelijk: hier gaat gerockt worden.

67 jaar oud werd Elvis Costello afgelopen zomer. Je hoort het niet af aan dit album dat voluit The Boy Named If (And Other Children’s Stories) heet. Natuurlijk, zijn zang klinkt niet meer precies als in 1977, toen hij zich in het kielzog van de punk als boze jongeman positioneerde met het album My Aim Is True, maar je herkent zijn stem nog altijd meteen: scherp, een tikje nasaal en vooral enthousiast.

Zo levenslustig komt Costello op The Boy Named If over dat het moeilijk is voor te stellen dat zijn leven nog helemaal niet zo lang geleden serieus werd bedreigd door kanker.

Coherent geheel
Voor Costellofans was de coronapandemie niet per se een slechte tijd. In oktober 2020 verscheen van hem het album Hey Clockface, daarna waren er een luxueuze heruitgave van het album Armed Forces uit 1979 en een met vooral latinmuzikanten opgenomen Spaanstalige versie van het album This Years Model (1978), die Spanish Model heette.

Waar de muziek op Hey Clockface een wel heel bonte mix van stijlen bevatte, is The Boy Named If een coherent geheel. De plaat bevat dertien puntige en directe songs, snapshots noemt Costello ze zelf, in de stijl van de new wave die hij in de late jaren zeventig, vroege jaren tachtig maakte. Toen waren zijn begeleiders The Attractions, nu heetten ze The Imposters, maar heeft het trio alleen een andere bassist.

In de teksten op The Boy Named If gaat Costello nog verder terug in het verleden. In het bijbehorende persbericht zegt hij dat het album vooral gaat over ‘dat afgrijselijke moment dat je te horen krijgt dat je je niet langer als een kind mag gedragen’. Hij zegt er meteen bij dat gelukkig heel wat mannen en vrouwen de boel vaak wel vijftig jaar weten te rekken.

Luidruchtig en druk
Costello slaagt er op dit album goed in nog altijd jeugdig te klinken, nou ja, laten we zeggen: energiek. Hij heeft daarbij een goede aan drummer Pete Thomas, die het hele album lang enorm op dreef is. Wat een heerlijk slagwerker is dat toch: luidruchtig en druk, maar nergens bot of overheersend.

Hier en daar wordt op The Boy Named If even flink gas teruggenomen. En ook dat levert mooie dingen op, heel mooie zelfs. Zoals lang geleden op Costello’s debuut My Aim Is True de ballad Allison toch het indrukwekkendste nummer was, weet Costello op The Boy Named If helemaal aan het einde na een hele serie muzikale stompen en schoppen ook nog even zwaar te ontroeren met het deels akoestische Mr. Crescent.
———————
Google translation

Rake musical punches and kicks from Elvis Costello

A few times wildly played guitar and then immediately, bam, vocals and drums in, both also so impetuous. With the versatile Elvis Costello it is always a matter of waiting for each album to see what the listener will be presented with, but on The Boy Named If, his 26th (!) studio album, it is immediately clear: there will be rocking here.

Elvis Costello turned 67 last summer. You can't hear it from this album, which is called The Boy Named If (And Other Children's Stories) in full. Of course, his vocals don't sound exactly like they did in 1977, when he positioned himself as an angry young man in the wake of punk with the album My Aim Is True, but you can still immediately recognize his voice: sharp, a bit nasal and above all enthusiastic. .

Costello appears so full of life on The Boy Named If that it's hard to imagine that his life was seriously threatened by cancer not so long ago.

Coherent whole
For Costello fans, the corona pandemic was not necessarily a bad time. His album Hey Clockface was released in October 2020, followed by a luxurious reissue of the 1979 album Armed Forces and a Spanish-language version of the album This Years Model (1978), which was called Spanish Model, mainly with Latin musicians.

Where the music on Hey Clockface contained a very colorful mix of styles, The Boy Named If is a coherent whole. The record contains thirteen pointed and direct songs, snapshots Costello calls them himself, in the style of the new wave that he made in the late seventies and early eighties. Back then his accompanists were The Attractions, now they were called The Imposters, but the trio only has a different bass player.

In the lyrics to The Boy Named If, Costello goes even further back into the past. In the accompanying press release, he says that the album is mainly about "that horrific moment when you are told that you can no longer act like a child". He immediately adds that fortunately a lot of men and women often manage to stretch things for fifty years.

Noisy and crowded
Costello manages to still sound youthful on this album, well, let's say: energetic. Drummer Pete Thomas is a great asset to him, who is in great shape throughout the entire album. What a wonderful percussionist he is: noisy and busy, but never blunt or dominant.

Here and there, The Boy Named If slows down quite a bit. And that also produces beautiful things, very beautiful ones in fact. Just as the ballad Allison was the most impressive song on Costello's debut My Aim Is True long ago, Costello on The Boy Named If at the very end, after a whole series of musical punches and kicks, also manages to move with the partly acoustic Mr. crescent.
Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.
sweetest punch
Posts: 5961
Joined: Sat Apr 03, 2004 5:49 am
Location: Belgium

Re: The Boy Named If, new album by Elvis & The Imposters, January 14, 2022

Post by sweetest punch »

https://www.slantmagazine.com/music/elv ... um-review/

Elvis Costello The Boy Named If Review: An Adrenaline-Fueled Picture of Fleeting Youth
At its best, Elvis Costello’s The Boy Named If rivals the fractious energy and melodic verve of the singer’s classic period.
4 stars (out of 5)

Despite his auspicious beginnings as a punk-adjacent firebrand, Elvis Costello has, for the past few decades, eschewed rock music in favor piano jazz, Tin Pan Alley balladry, and various other adult-pop idioms. Even the singer-songwriter’s studio work with the Imposters—essentially the Attractions but with Cracker’s Davey Faragher slotted in for the estranged Bruce Thomas—rarely rocks as consistently as the band’s live shows. But if The Boy Named If, Costello’s 32nd studio album and fourth credited to him and the Imposters, is any indication, he’s been deliberately holding out. In its best moments, the album rivals the fractious energy and melodic verve of the singer’s classic period.

Costello’s last project, Spanish Model, was a reimagining of his 1978 album This Year’s Model, featuring an array of Latin artists singing Spanish-language versions of the songs over the original backing tracks. It seems conceivable that the process of excavating and recasting his old material influenced the way that Costello approached The Boy Named If. The Imposters play with a comparable sense of nervous energy here—impressive given that the band mostly recorded their parts separately at their respective homes due to the pandemic.

Costello has described the songs on The Boy Named If as depicting “the last days of a bewildered boyhood to that mortifying moment when you are told to stop acting like a child.” It is, perhaps, that sense of fleeting adolescence that turned Costello into the romantically jaded angry young man who made This Year’s Model and 1977’s My Aim Is True.

On “Magnificent Hurt,” Costello proclaims: “But the pain that I felt/Lеt me know I’m alive/And I openеd my heart/To the way you make me feel.” It’s a vulnerable, tragically romantic sentiment that doesn’t sound much like something that the churlish, steeled-off Costello of old would profess. Similarly, on the delightfully playful “Penelope Halfpenny,” he marvels over an older crush where the late-‘70s Costello would have only sneered.

Throughout much of The Boy Named If, Costello underscores these youthful themes with such zesty melodicism that one could be fooled into thinking that he’d started writing songs with Paul McCartney again. The album’s booming blues-pop title track, an ode to mischievous imaginary friend, swings in alternately demented and giddy fashion, while “The Difference” and “Mistook Me for a Friend” barrel ahead with radiant hooks.

With “What If I Can’t Give You Anything but Love” and “My Most Beautiful Mistake,” Costello offers freewheeling country-inflected songs while still giving the Imposters free reign to work up their usual nervy groove. That’s something that could rarely even be said about the Attractions’s more formulaic forays into the genre during their heyday in the ‘80s. Elsewhere, Steve Nieve’s rave-y organ licks play expertly against Costello’s spitfire vocals on “Magnificent Hurt” and the clattering boogie of “Farewell, OK.”

After all that, the tail-end of The Boy Named If finds Costello suddenly back in crooner mode with the soft-shoe swing of “Trick Out the Truth” and the moonstruck “Mr. Crescent.” Both tracks are quietly exquisite and provide a comedown from the adrenaline-fueled highs of the album’s first half. They underscore the ways in which The Boy Named If is as complete and often thrilling as anything Costello has recorded in years.
Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.
sweetest punch
Posts: 5961
Joined: Sat Apr 03, 2004 5:49 am
Location: Belgium

Re: The Boy Named If, new album by Elvis & The Imposters, January 14, 2022

Post by sweetest punch »

https://www.pastemagazine.com/music/elv ... um-review/

Elvis Costello and The Imposters Show Their Fangs on Fiery Return to Form The Boy Named If

I first became aware of Elvis Costello’s music after hearing the reggae noir of the My Aim Is True single “Watching The Detectives” on my local Manchester, Vermont, alternative-rock station WEQX, and since then, his brash and over-enunciated, detailed narration has been a near-constant companion in my life. Recently, my wife made an offhand remark about Costello that kind of cracked his whole thing open and helped me to appreciate him even more. We were listening to Trust while cleaning our house when she described him as “edgy restaurant rock.” I knew she intended it as a well-timed, expertly executed burn on Declan McManus. But it could also be one of the more perfect descriptions I’ve heard of his persona as a brash, quick-witted songsmith who could cut it up with the punks and put on a suit to schmooze with elite rock dilettantes, only to spill their secrets to anyone who would listen.

Skilled with the pen, and with a breadth of musical knowledge that stretched outside of pub rock and power-pop compositions, Costello has made his fair share of brave choices that seem more puzzling now when you look at them in retrospect. Albums like the haunting baroque pop of Harle: Terror and Magnificence and the bluegrass of Secret, Profane and Sugarcane make all the sense in the world if you are a dedicated fan, but may seem curious if you are only familiar with the punchy hits that defined his Ray Ban-donned “New Wave” persona. But no one would be at fault to long for Costello and his long-running backing band The Imposters—who are the same Attractions lineup of Steve Nieve on keys and Pete Thomas on drums, with Davey Faragher filling in on bass for Bruce Thomas—to cut an album of nervy pop tunes in the mold of his classics like This Year’s Model and Armed Forces. Over the last few years, Costello has fed that hunger with a pair of fantastic return-to-form albums, 2018’s Look Now and 2020’s Hey Clockface. Now, with his brand new album The Boy Named If, he caps off this trio with a dense collection of both risks and hooks that doesn’t feel like a stamping of feet for attention or merely providing fan service.

On the album’s thundercrack lead-off track and recent single “Farewell OK,” the band sound as rejuvenated as ever, with Costello’s “sorry-but-not-sorry” snarl and Nieve’s signature Vox Continental organ peppered throughout the British invasion-inspired rock rave-up. Even though Costello and the band revisited This Year’s Model for a Spanish re-imagining last year, the other album that seems to be sneaking into his purview on The Boy Named If is 1986’s Blood and Chocolate. Its performances’ menacing aggression and the direct treatment of Costello’s vocals are inline with that album’s kiss-off nature. It’s especially thrilling to hear Elvis returning to the part of the sleazy snake oil salesmen on the highlight “Mistook Me For a Friend,” sneering lines like, “I had a pocket full of presidents, a suitcase full of elements,” and “Went to the carnival for candy and confusion.”

Best of all is the amped-up infidelity quandary “What If I Can’t Give You Anything But Love.” The song adopts the off-kilter shuffle of the Fab Four’s “Dig A Pony” or Hendrix’s “Manic Depression,” with Thomas proving once again why he may be the greatest drummer to emerge from punk’s first wave. In Costello’s memoir Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink, he explains that he first gained confidence as a singer after hearing Rick Danko’s wounded yelps on The Band’s albums like Music From Big Pink. Perhaps this approach to singing might explain his unwavering strength as a vocalist, as he sounds strong as ever on “Anything But Love.” When he hits the high note in its climax, it’s hard to believe he’s just three years shy of 70.

The recording of the album is a marvel all on its own. When checking in with newer releases from artists of the same era, the production quality tends to be one of the biggest areas of disappointment. So many legacy artists either try to doctor away the aging process with treated vocals, or create synthetic robo-performances with the aid of producers who miss the point of what made the artists great in the first place. That could be a loss of perspective from a coddled artist resting on their accolades. But you get a sense listening to The Boy Named If that Costello and The Imposters understand that the fire they had in those albums from the late ‘70s and early ‘80s was worth chasing, warts and all. In a recent interview with Costello’s old producer and friend Nick Lowe on the Aquarium Drunkard: Transmissions Podcast, Lowe told host Jason P. Woodbury that Costello had asked him if he would be interested in recording with the band again at a session they had booked at Abbey Road. Unfortunately, those hopes were dashed when the pandemic made it impossible, forcing each band member to send in their individual parts for Costello and Sebastian Krys to piece together. But hearing the record, you can tell Costello and Krys did some reverse engineering on the albums that Lowe helmed. You can hear it on the cracking snare sound of songs like “The Death Of Magical Thinking” and “Farewell OK.” Maybe one day we’ll get those two legends back into the studio to recapture those old spirits. But for now, you really can’t argue with these results.

By now, Costello has earned the right to throw away any advice on editing down his records. But if there is one complaint to be made of The Boy Named If, it’s that it falls short of being the compact blast of a record that it could have been. At 13 songs and close to an hour long, the album would highly benefit from losing two or three songs in favor of adding precision to its impact. While it’s a beautiful ballad, “Paint The Red Rose Blue” would be better served on a different more relaxed album. Never adverse to hamming it up, Costello indulges his ragtime fandom via the tuneless quasi-carnival pop of the anti-fascist “Trick Out The Truth” that drags out the album’s final stretch. Both of those low-key numbers are bested by the Nicole Atkins duet “My Most Beautiful Mistake” and the album’s excellent closing ballad, “Mr. Crescent.” If those tracks were treated more as moments of reprieve amidst a fiery set of rockers, they would stand out for the sweet dynamic shifts that they are. With so much of our time feeling more precious than ever, you can’t be upset at Costello for over-delivering when he has the opportunity. With The Boy Named If, Costello and The Imposters show they are still capable of kicking each other under the table at the restaurant, showing their fangs to the manager when they’ve been told to leave.
Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.
sweetest punch
Posts: 5961
Joined: Sat Apr 03, 2004 5:49 am
Location: Belgium

Re: The Boy Named If, new album by Elvis & The Imposters, January 14, 2022

Post by sweetest punch »

https://narcmagazine.com/album-review-e ... -named-if/

ALBUM REVIEW: ELVIS COSTELLO & THE IMPOSTERS – THE BOY NAMED IF
EWAN GLEADOW DISCOVERS AN ALBUM OF BITING LYRICS AND CHARMING CATCHINESS
3/5

The new album from Elvis Costello and The Imposters, The Boy Named If, grinds out old band vices and sharpens new and invigorating song choices. They may have pursued the “Helsinki sound” on previous release Hey, Clockface, but the search is apparently over. The Boy Named If has none of the janky sounds or cluttered noises of their preceding album, but there are a few new bumps in the road.

Farewell, OK is a simple enough opener, albeit a dud single. Penelope Halfpenny follows suit after a quick interval with the strengths of the titular track. But after that, Costello goes from strength to strength with a tone and lyrical wit; those guitar-heavy swings and crooning lyrics are a staple of Costello and company’s style and feature well enough throughout. Spotty moments appear frequently, but happening upon a quality track is fairly frequent.

Whether it is What If I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, an emotive and exciting track breaking down the languishing throes of love or first single Magnificent Hurt, The Boy Named If is not without its merits. Despite the simplicity of Paint The Red Rose Blue, it has a charming catchiness to it and works well as a strange companion piece to Costello’s 1989, politically-charged track Tramp The Dirt Down. The reliance these tracks have on drummer Pete Thomas is telling, he more or less keeps Mistook Me For A Friend together, and can be heard breaking through with an almost equal importance to the lyrics.

The Boy Named If is not as venomous and proactive as previous album Hey, Clockface, but it’s still marked as a definitive release for the post-boom Costello age. The eponymous track is a creepy and twisted offering that steer the band away from the lighter tones of yesteryear, thanks to biting and accusatory lyrics which involve the listener. Overall, a varied offering from Costello and crew, which is more bark than bite.
Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.
User avatar
Psc
Posts: 63
Joined: Fri Jan 07, 2022 10:04 am

Re: The Boy Named If, new album by Elvis & The Imposters, January 14, 2022

Post by Psc »

sweetest punch wrote:https://twitter.com/ElvisCostello/statu ... 4350946305

Visit Elvis Costello’s store for a chance to win the signed 88-page hardback storybook edition of ‘The Boy Named If’ and an exclusive signed 7 inch. Open to US & UK residents only. https://elvis-costello.lnk.to/VinylComp

Image
So if you've already preordered the album (weeks ago), does anyone know if you still qualify for this competition?!
It's not a matter of life or death. But what is, what is?
sweetest punch
Posts: 5961
Joined: Sat Apr 03, 2004 5:49 am
Location: Belgium

Re: The Boy Named If, new album by Elvis & The Imposters, January 14, 2022

Post by sweetest punch »

Psc wrote:
sweetest punch wrote:https://twitter.com/ElvisCostello/statu ... 4350946305

Visit Elvis Costello’s store for a chance to win the signed 88-page hardback storybook edition of ‘The Boy Named If’ and an exclusive signed 7 inch. Open to US & UK residents only. https://elvis-costello.lnk.to/VinylComp

Image
So if you've already preordered the album (weeks ago), does anyone know if you still qualify for this competition?!
No purchase necessary, but you need to enter the competition: https://uk-umg.com/vvreg/31238-862530.html?t=1642003754

https://shopuk.elviscostello.com/*/Terms-Conditions/
The prize draw will run from 17.00pm GMT on Wednesday 12th January 2022 to 23.59pm GMT Thursday 20th January 2022. Entries received outside of this time will not be valid.
Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.
Post Reply