Red Mosquito

I'm leaning towards bad. It's pretty rough

I am in the midst of it now. It’s okay. Not great.

Ever since I got into Elvis Costello in the mid-2000s, I’ve never experienced the kind of disappointment long-time fans often express about his new work. With every release, I’d see nostalgic grumbles about how things "aren’t like the old days," but to me, every album he’s put out in the 21st century is its own kind of brilliant.

It bums me out to say that streak has ended. Despite my best efforts to get into it, I am prepared to declare The Coward Brothers album a total dud. After four full listens I am struggling to find even a handful of tracks worth salvaging (and it is a LONG album). The single, "Always," towers over the rest and maybe set my expectations unfairly high. Its heartfelt simplicity and warmth are sadly unmatched elsewhere on the record.

As for the rest, "My Baby Just Purrs" approaches the kind of unburdened, playful spirit much of the album seems to be striving for. "Birkenhead Girl" is obnoxious, but it also kind of reminds me of Tom Waits, so I enjoy it. Two T. Bone-led tracks are also very good: "World Serious" and "Wooden Woman," both of which have a lovely sentimentality to them, similar to "Always."

But no. This is really not good. It's a goof-around album. Like a bootleg. Loose and sloppy in a bad way. The compositions feel slapdash and ordinary, Elvis doesn't sound great, and the whole thing sounds very muddy and crowded. For all the "fun" he's having a lot of these songs just sound very labored and weighty. And it's so long, and not interesting enough to sustain the length.

Four full listens, all the way through. I think that's enough to move on. I'm really glad this is technically not an "Elvis Costello album" so I don't actually have to include it in my rankings. As it is, it slips right down to the bottom of my list, just above The New Basement Tapes.

Blame T-Bone.

Stephen Colbert closed off the last ever episode of the Late Show with a raucous performance of "Hello Goodbye" with Paul McCartney. But before that performance, he sang "Jump Up", an extremely obscure Elvis Costello song that came from an old demo tape from 1975. He was joined by Costello on both performances.



It's funny because "Jump Up" is SUCH an obscure song I don't think even many EC diehards had ever heard it. Kinda crazy that it got such a huge platform. To put it in Eddie Vedder terms, this is like if he went on the final episode of some talk show and performed "What the Funk is Up"

I certainly didn’t recognize it. I figured it was some old song from the 40s or something.

Awesome performance, and as an EC fan, a delightful song choice.

Has that tune been released at all? Like as a bonus track on a reissue or something?

It was included as a bonus track on the 2001 Rhino reissue of EC's first album



It's not officially on streaming services but someone uploaded it to YouTube