Elvis Costello 38: The Coward Brothers

In the summer of 1984, Elvis Costello’s career found another path when he embarked on a solo tour and got along with his opening act, T Bone Burnett, like a house on fire. They bonded over their love of all American music and related arcana, and created wacky alternate egos called the Coward Brothers to play covers together. A collaborative single, “The People’s Limousine”, was their only credited output, though T Bone would go on to produce a handful of albums for and with Elvis over the years, beginning with King Of America.

Forty years later, right on the heels of an expanded reissue spurred by that album, an official Coward Brothers album finally appeared, billed as the soundtrack to an EC-penned radio play. Directed by Christopher Guest and available exclusively on the Audible platform, The True Story Of The Coward Brothers is full of forced wordplay and inside jokes in the guise of a documentary about the mythical duo. T Bone exaggerates his Texan accent, while Elvis leans so much on his Scouse origins that he often sounds like a raspy John Lennon caricature. Even reading his own words, the man is still no actor.

Unfortunately, the storyline does little to illuminate the 20 songs on The Coward Brothers, and vice versa. Most were written by Elvis alone, four are collaborations with T Bone (who’s solely credited on just one), and three were written with Guest, who also adds vocals and instrumentation here and there. The production has T Bone’s stamp all over it, and not just on the tracks featuring Burnett regulars Dennis Crouch and Jay Bellarose. But what works very well for Robert Plant and Alison Krauss just sounds here like they spent a lot of money making the recordings sound cheap and distorted, like the primitive tapes they’re purported to be. This wouldn’t be such a big deal if the songs were stellar, but they’re not.

“Always” is a wonderful opener, a gentle duet, shoved aside by the dotty piano and wheezy organ of “Like Licorice”. “My Baby Just Squeals (You Heel)” may have been their mythical smash single, but the pointedly amateurish production and female interjections don’t do the track any favors, nor does the steal from the Stones’ “Connection”. “Devil Doll” would have promise, except that T Bone recites the verses; apparently they couldn’t find a melody worthy of the choruses. “Tipsy Woman”, however, has all the hallmarks of a future classic, with not too clever wordplay and a compelling delivery.

The story would have us believe that “My Baby Just Purrs (You’re Mine, Not Hers)” was the cash-in follow-up to that earlier alleged hit, but it’s better song and recording, worthy of early Attractions. However, “My Baby Just Whistles (Here Come The Missiles)” pushes the gag too far. Past the opening line (“Eating ice chrome at the spaceball game”) “World Serious” has inscrutable lyrics about something we can’t discern but it’s still one of the better tracks, whatever it’s about. “Early Shirley” has a pleasing rockabilly skiffle quality, but “Yesteryear Is Near” is an obnoxious parody of wartime music hall. Elvis’s affected Cockney delivery doesn’t help.

He keeps the Scouse going for “Birkenhead Girl”, mostly a distorted litany of local landmarks. “Smoke Ring Angel” is one of the ones with Guest, and we’ll give him credit for its success. “Wooden Woman” is another one not sunk by its own cleverness, but “(I Don’t Want Your) Lyndon Johnson” doesn’t have any; plus, we’re getting tired of the clunky sound. “Lotta Money” doubles down on it, and there’s that dotty piano again. (Guest was also partly responsible, but he already encapsulated the subject decades before.)

“Pure Bubblegum” is an Elvis solo experiment; these don’t usually work under his own name, and this one is just plain obnoxious. The apparent Vietnam protest of “Cathy Come Home” sinks under the weight of its ambition; he’s written better songs on the same theme without relying on effects. All this makes T Bone’s “Bygones” very welcome, musically as well as literally. Despite the forced calypso party atmosphere, “Row Me Once” is a fun singalong, and also the third Guest contribution. The simply tuneful “Clown Around Town” finally ends the album, albeit on a hoarse note.

Maybe this is a case of good songs produced badly, or maybe we should treat it as a lark and not a Major Statement. At any rate, The Coward Brothers is about as anticlimactic as such planned sequels as Little Village was to John Hiatt’s Bring The Family, or the second Traveling Wilburys album. The brothers should have stuck to acoustic duets.

The Coward Brothers The Coward Brothers (2024)—2

Dwight Twilley 5: Jungle

The ‘80s were the best of times for some, and the worst of times for others. Some people successfully embraced new sounds, and others were swallowed by them. Dwight Twilley already knew the guy who invented the Linn drum machine, and he wasn’t so stubborn that he wouldn’t see what synthesizers could do for his career. But while Jungle was something of a hit, it has not aged well.

The dramatic piano intro to “Little Bit Of Love” is a false alarm, as a synth part right out of the Eurythmics playbook drives the rest of the tune. It’s still got a killer chorus, bolstered once again by Susan Cowsill. But people likely bought the album on the basis of “Girls”, which got a lot of play on MTV thanks to its Porky’s-inspired video. (In a clever touch, Carla Olsen lip-synchs the lines Tom Petty actually sang.) “Why You Wanna Break My Heart” is pure ear candy, given new life—and fat royalty checks for its author—a decade later when it was covered for the Wayne’s World soundtrack. “You Can Change It” has a lot of crunch, but the choruses are starting to sound the same; this case, they sound much better in “Cry Baby”.

After a dramatic backwards fade-in “Don’t You Love Her” chugs along inoffensively, whereas “Long Lonely Nights” doesn’t need its minor key synth intro, totally at odds with the rest of the track. Even worse, the title track sounds like a Cars parody until he starts singing. “To Get To You” would be a decent rockabilly track if not for the backing, and the thunderstorm effects are misplaced. The jokey “Max Dog” is silly, but it’s got personality, and it’s welcome, though we don’t know how it took three people to write it.

It’s too bad that “Girls” is still so terrific, as the rest of the album doesn’t live up to it. We blame the era. Indeed, the eventual expanded CD included six outtakes slash demos that were a little more palatable sonically, especially “Forget About It” and superior takes of “Long Lonely Nights”, “You Can Change It”, and “Jungle”.

Dwight Twilley Jungle (1984)—2½
2024 CD reissue: same as 1984, plus 6 extra tracks

Mark Knopfler 13: One Deep River

It seems that whenever Mark Knopfler has amassed a pile of new songs, he records all of them, then releases them in bulk. One wonders whether the songs on One Deep River all arrived at once, explaining the six-year gap since his last album.

Whatever the story is, it’s pretty much more of what we’ve come to expect. “Two Pairs Of Hands” shuffles into play on mostly one chord. “Ahead Of The Game” has a more striking backing and hooks, and succeeds on those. The first two verses seem to be a reminiscence of the days before “Sultans Of Swing”, while the final draws a line to anyone trying to get by. “Smart Money” can’t decide if it’s country or Caribbean, while “Scavengers Yard” is suitably clanky, with a processed break that veers dangerously close to techno before escaping. “Black Tie Jobs” is almost stately, with canned chamber pop strings. “Tunnel 13” tells the true-life tale of a train robbery turned tragic, but as with much of his solo material, the loping backing doesn’t necessarily keep you riveted to the story.

Another scene is set for “Janine”, but it works better as a love song without context. “Watch Me Gone” is more mournful, with surprising female voices on the choruses. Beginning with a spooky, wintry atmosphere, “Sweeter Than The Rain” uses his already craggy yet aging voice to good effect, and “Before My Train Comes” is nice, even if it sounds too much like too many of his other songs. The somewhat plodding “This One’s Not Going To End Well” may or may not be social commentary on any political situation, but it is lifted by two brief fiddle solos. And the understated yet majestic title track does rank with his best.

His usual crack band backs him throughout One Deep River, and to the album’s credit, most of the tracks hover around four minutes each. But a further four tracks were added to the vinyl: “Dolly Shop Man”, an allegory about a pawn shop; the mildly romantic “Your Leading Man”; “Wrong ‘Un”, a good lyric in search of a better tune; and “Chess”, loaded with metaphors and resembling late-‘80s Chris Rea. And five others made it to deluxe CD and Blu-ray editions. The portrait of a has-been in “The Living End” is sunk by “shoop shoop” backing vocals, whereas “Fat Chance Dupree” has guys sounding like the Jordainaires. Celtic pipes finally make an appearance on “Along A Foreign Coast”, and the one-sided conversation in “What I’m Gonna Need” doesn’t go anywhere despite the nice melody. “Nothing But Rain” would have been welcome on the album, bluesy as it is.

Further proof that good editing makes good listening, less than a month after the album’s release came The Boy, an EP of four thematically related songs inspired (so Knopfler said) by the fairgrounds of his youth, complete with ambient effects. Lyrically we can see that, but the music could accompany any story, and not just one about a boxer. “Mr. Solomons Said” is the cool jazzy setup, and the title track explores the character from another perspective. “All Comers” is strong enough to stand outside the framework, and so does “Bad Day For A Knife Thrower”, but it doesn’t roll as easy. Unlike most of the other bonus tracks, any of these tracks are as good as what made the album, deluxe or otherwise. It surprises us that he wasn’t able to expand the concept; surely other songs on One Deep River could have been revised to fit the story?

Mark Knopfler One Deep River (2024)—3
Mark Knopfler The Boy (2024)—3

Yardbirds 4: Greatest Hits

American labels knew how to recycle product in the ‘60s, and since a few months had gone by since the last album, Epic decided to release a greatest hits set by the Yardbirds. It’s only half an hour long, as were a lot of albums back then, but it really does cover their hits to date. It includes two songs from the first album, four songs from Having A Rave-Up, and only “Over Under Sideways Down” from that album. New to LP in the states were the previous year’s stellar single “Shapes Of Things” and its B-side “New York City Blues” (which opens with the same riff Jimmy Page would cop for “You Shook Me”, adding insult to Jeff Beck’s injury, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves), plus “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago”, which means the album includes performances by all three of the band’s soon-to-be-legendary lead guitarists.

Three years later, once each of those lead guitarists had become household names in households that listened to FM radio, Epic issued a double album with the inspired title Featuring Performances By Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page. With 20 songs coming in at just under an hour, it repeated nothing from the hits album—which had covered pretty much all of the songs that qualified as actual hits—and scrambled deep tracks from all the American albums in no understandable sequence, seesawing from blues to experimental. The bizarre cover art was typical of the era, and the same designer would get to work on another related project ere long.

Both of these compilations would go out of print by the end of the ‘70s, and because the masters were owned by different managers depending on who produced what, licensing would continue to be wonky, and shoddy rehashes abounded overseas. Then, in 1986, the Rhino made good on their original brief to restore music to the masses with a hits collection with the hopeful title of Volume One. This set concentrated on the Giorgio Gomelsky era, with began with Clapton and covered the first two American albums, including two further tracks from Five Live Yardbirds. It did a fine job of presenting them as blues interpreters, but the contents predated some of Beck’s innovations.

While a second volume never materialized, Rhino did score a coup in the new century with Ultimate! This was another apt title, as it crammed two CDs full of just about everything, starting with their first demos, through four tracks from Five Live Yardbirds, most of the three American albums, and all key singles and B-sides, plus a rare Italian single and three fey Keith Relf solo sides. Attention to detail ensured liner notes and comprehensive discographical information, including recording dates, locations, and even engineers; who knew Eddy Offord, Roy Halee, and even Bones Howe taped this band?

This, too, is out of print, but luckily in the digital era it’s possible to stream most of the music. The original albums are out there, along with various grey-area live performances. And of course, the BBC. After scoring the rights to Roger The Engineer, Warner Archives followed another ‘90s catalog trend with the 1997 release of BBC Sessions for the first time in the US after a few years floating around elsewhere. This set presented 26 tracks from the Beck and Page eras, complete with interview snippets from the usual clipped-voiced deejays and a few tunes that never made it to wax. This too became scarce, until 2024 brought The Ultimate Live At The BBC—they sure like that adjective—box of four discs.

The Yardbirds The Yardbirds’ Greatest Hits (1967)—4
The Yardbirds Featuring Performances By Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page (1970)—3½
The Yardbirds Greatest Hits, Volume One (1964-1966) (1986)—3½
The Yardbirds Ultimate! (2001)—4
Current CD availability: none

Ben Folds 16: Sleigher

For the longest time, Ben Folds had exactly two Christmas songs in his catalog: “Lonely Christmas Eve” from the live-action film version of How The Grinch Stole Christmas, and the profane “Bizarre Christmas Incident”, written for said film when all he knew about the project was that it was to be a comedy about Christmas directed by Ron Howard and starring Jim Carrey. (We don’t count “Brick” for the same reason that Die Hard is not a Christmas movie.) Still, we always suspected that the king of piano snark would be sentimental around the holidays, and he finally got to explore it with an album cleverly titled Sleigher, which mixes originals with three covers.

We still can’t find the melody of “Little Drummer Bolero”—it doesn’t sound like the “pa rum-pum pum pum” song—but it’s a lovely instrumental. “Sleepwalking Through Christmas” has just a twinge of melancholy, but it’s not as lonesome nor as touching as “Me And Maurice” (the pair is even depicted in the cover cartoon, complete with “full green bag of shame”). “Christmas Time Rhyme” does a nice job of stringing together images from the perspective of kids of all ages, with just one eff-bomb. Another instrumental, “Waiting For Snow” is brief but still pretty.

“We Could Have This” finally inserts some romance and the promise of a happy future, sung as a duet with the mildly chirpy Lindsey Kraft. The most obvious and least daring tune is “The Christmas Song”, as his rendition of chestnuts roasting is accompanied by guitar, piano, and harmonica. He heard Burt Bacharach’s “The Bell That Couldn’t Jingle” (with lyrics by the same guy who wrote the lyrics for “Speak Softly Love” from The Godfather and other movie themes) from a Herb Alpert album, and it’s very evocative of that style, but “Xmas Aye Eye” (as in AI) is a complete shift, grating electro-pop with lyrics provided by ChatGPT and peppered with sound effects. Finally, “You Don’t Have To Be A Santa Claus” is all Mills Brothers, and good advice any day.

At just under 35 minutes, Sleigher certainly doesn’t wear out its welcome, even if the harmonica does. But given the beauty of the instrumentals, we would certainly welcome more tracks like that. Maybe next year.

Ben Folds Sleigher (2024)—3

Thomas Dolby 5: The Gate To The Mind’s Eye

Having slowly wearied of trying to compete in the modern music industry marketplace, Thomas Dolby stayed true to his nature by following the latest in technology, which by the ‘90s had increasingly relied on computers. This meant he got gigs scoring computer-based video games, so it was an easy step to computer animation, just as it was starting to blossom. Since he was still signed to a label, The Gate To The Mind’s Eye was his soundtrack to the third in a series of computer-generated films, none of which we’ve seen and don’t plan to. (The previous soundtrack was scored by Jan Hammer, the next by Kansas founder Kerry Livgren.) As background music, it’s mostly inoffensive, but not exactly groundbreaking.

Much of it is instrumental, but there are some vocal pieces. “Armageddon” has lyrics, mostly in Latin, with operatic vocals that continue on “Planet Of Lost Souls”, which is nicest when it’s just the piano. “N.E.O.” is mostly spoken by respected (so we’re told) Italian astrophysicist Fiorella Terenzi; he’s credited with the closing “rap” but at least he’s not trying to be the most illinest B-boy. Despite beginning with a quote from one of Napoleon’s letters to Josephine, “Valley Of The Mind’s Eye” is a fairly lush love song, while “Nuvogue” is a swing jazz tune that would have fit fine on Aliens Ate My Buick. But “Quantum Mechanic” is a techno song warbled by Dr. Terenzi, who also supplied the words. These days it almost sounds like a parody.

The album didn’t do much for his record sales, but for those who weren’t interested in following his esoteric muse, earlier in the year a compilation cleverly titled Retrospectacle delivered the handful of hits and a few deep cuts. The main attraction for fans was the availability of “Urges” and “Leipzig”, which had been added to the first US version of the first album but soon dropped in favor of “She Blinded Me With Science” and “One Of Our Submarines”. Beyond that, it samples each of his first four albums for a chronological yet cohesive sampler.

Thomas Dolby The Best Of Thomas Dolby: Retrospectacle (1994)—3½
Thomas Dolby The Gate To The Mind’s Eye Soundtrack (1994)—2½

Fairport Convention 3: Unhalfbricking

Like a lot of bands, Fairport Convention truly hit their stride with their third album. On Unhalfbricking they moved much closer to electrified English folk, setting the standard for others to follow. By this time Ian Matthews had left the band, bringing the core members down to five, but the presence of Dave Swarbrick on fiddle and mandolin would lead to his joining full-time, and we’re getting ahead of ourselves again.

As befits an album with a mysterious, meaningless title, it’s opened by the keening electric dulcimers on “Genesis Hall”, a typically brooding Richard Thompson lyric. Bob Dylan would get a chunk of the publishing royalties from this album, as three of his more obscure songs are included, the first being “Si Tu Dois Partir”, a near-jug band rendition of “If You Gotta Go, Go Now” translated into French. The complicated meter of “Autopsy” only enhances the gothic tone of the lyrics, but it’s “A Sailor’s Life” that is the literal and figurative centerpiece. Over eleven minutes this traditional tune begins quietly and builds much like the rolling sea, Sandy Denny sounding every inch of a fair maiden, Thompson tearing off a terrific guitar line against Swarbrick’s violin once let loose. And then the sea is calm again.

The 12-bar “Cajun Woman” is something of a rockin’ palate cleanser, as the tender and wistful “Who Knows Where The Time Goes?” is finally heard in Sandy’s own rendition. Another Dylan obscurity, “Percy’s Song”, gets something of a campfire treatment but for those electric dulcimers and organ, and everyone gets a turn at a verse of “Million Dollar Bash”, back when The Basement Tapes was still a bootleg. (A later British CD added two Dylan-related bonus tracks: an outtake of “Dear Landlord”, plus “Ballad Of Easy Rider”—to which Dylan supposedly contributed one line—that was an outtake from the next album, but included for thematic reasons.)

The album’s release was unfortunately clouded by the death of drummer Martin Lamble two months earlier in a van accident while the band was traveling back from a gig. What’s more, while the British cover depicted the band partially concealed behind a fence at Sandy Denny’s parents’ house (they’re the pair in front), for some reason the American label decided to use a clearer snapshot of the band, albeit in the corner of a sleeve dominated by dancing elephants. Nonetheless, the music within is quirky yet solid, garnering the rating below. There’s really not much more we can say about it.

Fairport Convention Unhalfbricking (1969)—4