When Elvis Costello isn't trashing Rod Stewart for singing "Sweet Caroline" over "You Wear It Well" at the Queen's Jubilee, he's busy resurrecting his first band Rusty, a duo with Allan Mayes, and finally getting around to recording the album that should have been recorded 50 years ago.
Was it worth the wait?
Sure!
"The Resurrection Of Rust" is a little over 26 minutes, a perfect length, and just about all of it is solid. Nothing here is groundbreaking, but all of it is well worth repeated spins, as the duo covers two Nick Lowe tunes from the Brinsley days, a pair of Neil Young tunes turned into a medley, one by the great underappreciated songwriting genius Jim Ford who was a big influence on both Nick Lowe and Elvis, and two 50 year old Costello/Mayes originals.
I really love that this project came to be. It can be looked at as just a tossed-off Imposters project, but I doubt very much Allan Mayes feels that way, and for that alone, "The Resurrection Of Rust" is a worthy release.
6 comments:
Sounds good!
My kind of Elvis!
Randy
So much fun. And it's also the resurrection of two great Brinsley Schwarz songs; wish those songs hadn't remained forgotten for so long.
Bill
It does just fit like an old pair of jeans!
Thanks for the heads-up. Speaking of the Queen's Pageant, I can't for the life of me imagine why the concert on Saturday night climaxed with...Diana Ross. Hey. great talent and she's been around almost as long as the Queen and frankly sounded in pretty good voice. But why Diana Ross? Does the Queen like her? I would have finished with Elton John, needless to say. And where the heck was Paul McCartney? Maybe they were worried he'd get cheeky and sing "Her Majesty" from Abbey Road.
I quite like it without being blown away. I was at the Glasgow show where he dissed Rod Stewart. Stewart very much plays up his connections to Scotland and Glasgow so I guess EC was being a little iconoclastic, though his comments wert down very well in the most republican town in the UK. Tix were really expensive, and having seen him loads of times I was going to skip it but I got a couple of cheap tickets on the day, so I relented. Wrong venue - sit down crowd, it's really a classical music venue but the sound was muffled up in the circle and probably the oddest setlist I've seen him play with a band - light on a lot of the classics he played on other nights of the UK tour with them replaced by a bunch of tunes from the last couple of albums. Newspaper Pane and We're All Cowards Now worked well, the tracks off the new album, while great, aren't a stretch or departure for that band. All in all a curiously subdued gig. I mention it because of the Stewart diss and because he used a couple of the Rusty tunes as walls on and walk off music.
Post a Comment