Hey Clockface released October 30, 2020

Pretty self-explanatory
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Hawksmoor
Posts: 625
Joined: Mon Jun 16, 2003 2:51 pm

Re: New album Hey Clockface will be released October 30, 2020

Post by Hawksmoor »

And No Coffee Table wrote:
chickendinna wrote:There is an exclusive bonus track on the Japanese version.
Universal Music Japan says the bonus track is "Phonographic Memory."

https://www.universal-music.co.jp/elvis ... ucco-1224/
Fair enough. A track we all had anyway - but then, so is 'I Wish It Would Rain'? No loss?
jardine
Posts: 801
Joined: Sat Sep 11, 2010 12:59 pm

Re: New album Hey Clockface will be released October 30, 2020

Post by jardine »

oh crap. I always feel like I am stealing something if it is commercially available and i just download it only. Doesn't feel like I "have" it and doesn't feel right to not buy it if I can. C'mon clockface special edition with shut the f$%#& up on it too! [that was the name, right?]

Yes i'm old. Get off my lawn. 8)
Pigalle
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Joined: Thu May 14, 2009 3:04 am

Re: New album Hey Clockface will be released October 30, 2020

Post by Pigalle »

And another coloured variant:

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/hey-cl ... o/35408664

I think that makes seven coloured versions so far unless anyone knows different.
Hawksmoor
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Joined: Mon Jun 16, 2003 2:51 pm

Re: New album Hey Clockface will be released October 30, 2020

Post by Hawksmoor »

jardine wrote:oh crap. I always feel like I am stealing something if it is commercially available and i just download it only. Doesn't feel like I "have" it and doesn't feel right to not buy it if I can.
I'm morally OK with it. Have I downloaded 'No Flag', 'Hetty O'Hara', 'We Are All Cowards' and 'Hey Clockface' for free? Yep. Will I be coughing up £12:99 for the 'Hey Clockface' CD (which includes all of the above tracks)? Yep.

So truthfully, the only thing I've got 'free' is the chance to hear a few tracks from the LP (which I'll be buying anyway) a few weeks early? It's the equivalent of holding your cassette recorder up to the radio to record the singles, but you'd still buy the LP when it came out?
sulky lad
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Re: New album Hey Clockface will be released October 30, 2020

Post by sulky lad »

Hawksmoor wrote:
jardine wrote:oh crap. I always feel like I am stealing something if it is commercially available and i just download it only. Doesn't feel like I "have" it and doesn't feel right to not buy it if I can.
I'm morally OK with it. Have I downloaded 'No Flag', 'Hetty O'Hara', 'We Are All Cowards' and 'Hey Clockface' for free? Yep. Will I be coughing up £12:99 for the 'Hey Clockface' CD (which includes all of the above tracks)? Yep.

So truthfully, the only thing I've got 'free' is the chance to hear a few tracks from the LP (which I'll be buying anyway) a few weeks early? It's the equivalent of holding your cassette recorder up to the radio to record the singles, but you'd still buy the LP when it came out?
Brilliant !! love the analogy :D
jardine
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Re: New album Hey Clockface will be released October 30, 2020

Post by jardine »

All i was suggesting was that buying the thing if/when it is available to be bought is important and until then, it always feels to me like the deal isn't yet complete. If i just downloaded it, i don't feel like I now legitimately 'have' it and i feel that the artist has been had.

I do love the chance to hear things ahead of their release. And I do certanly download full albums or songs to see whether they can stand up to more than one listening (radio used to help me with this process, but not much anymore). But if i decide i like it, I will then buy it when it's available.
Hawksmoor
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Re: New album Hey Clockface will be released October 30, 2020

Post by Hawksmoor »

One question, colleagues: among the various versions of Hey Clockface listed on Amazon for pre-order, one is an 'SHM-CD (inc bonus track)'. What does the ''SHM' stand for?
sulky lad
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Re: New album Hey Clockface will be released October 30, 2020

Post by sulky lad »

Hawksmoor wrote:One question, colleagues: among the various versions of Hey Clockface listed on Amazon for pre-order, one is an 'SHM-CD (inc bonus track)'. What does the ''SHM' stand for?
Stands for Super High Material, a polycarbonate
Costing to give greater transparency on the surface of the CD and is apparently a means of improving the sound quality of the CD physically rather than just in the way the CDs are burned.
Hawksmoor
Posts: 625
Joined: Mon Jun 16, 2003 2:51 pm

Re: New album Hey Clockface will be released October 30, 2020

Post by Hawksmoor »

sulky lad wrote:
Hawksmoor wrote:One question, colleagues: among the various versions of Hey Clockface listed on Amazon for pre-order, one is an 'SHM-CD (inc bonus track)'. What does the ''SHM' stand for?
Stands for Super High Material, a polycarbonate
Costing to give greater transparency on the surface of the CD and is apparently a means of improving the sound quality of the CD physically rather than just in the way the CDs are burned.
Love it. 'You want to pay a bit more this time? Because we made this CD a special way - the way we usually produce them is a bit rubbish'. :lol:
sulky lad
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Re: New album Hey Clockface will be released October 30, 2020

Post by sulky lad »

Hawksmoor wrote:
sulky lad wrote:
Hawksmoor wrote:One question, colleagues: among the various versions of Hey Clockface listed on Amazon for pre-order, one is an 'SHM-CD (inc bonus track)'. What does the ''SHM' stand for?
Stands for Super High Material, a polycarbonate
Costing to give greater transparency on the surface of the CD and is apparently a means of improving the sound quality of the CD physically rather than just in the way the CDs are burned.
Love it. 'You want to pay a bit more this time? Because we made this CD a special way - the way we usually produce them is a bit rubbish'. :lol:
On a couple of reviews that I read, the most noticeable effect was playing these on "lo-fi" players rather than at the high end of the spectrum. One reviewer said he noticed the difference most in his car rather than on his £22K CD player
I always felt that this and SACD was a ploy for hi-fi snobs and a bit of a catchpenny but those reviews do seem a bit more realistic. however, the odds are much higher that you'll scratch or damage your CD by playing it in the car rather than just using it in a home hi-fi set up ( research courtesy of Dr. MWP - my son , probably hearsay !)) It seems a bit like the difference between chrome ( slightly upmarket) and metal cassettes (super elite) back in the 70s. :wink:
Hawksmoor
Posts: 625
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Re: New album Hey Clockface will be released October 30, 2020

Post by Hawksmoor »

sulky lad wrote:On a couple of reviews that I read, the most noticeable effect was playing these on "lo-fi" players rather than at the high end of the spectrum. One reviewer said he noticed the difference most in his car rather than on his £22K CD player
I always felt that this and SACD was a ploy for hi-fi snobs and a bit of a catchpenny but those reviews do seem a bit more realistic. however, the odds are much higher that you'll scratch or damage your CD by playing it in the car rather than just using it in a home hi-fi set up ( research courtesy of Dr. MWP - my son , probably hearsay !)) It seems a bit like the difference between chrome ( slightly upmarket) and metal cassettes (super elite) back in the 70s. :wink:
Interesting stuff. I don't think my ears are good enough these days to really detect much difference in sound quality (and certainly not enough to seriously affect my enjoyment, for better or for worse).

What I have noticed is...I have a lot of home-burned CDS (many of them EC). These have always played fine in the car, and fine on the cheap-as-chips/basic-as-you-like DVD player (through the TV). But my state-of-the-art Technics CD player in the lounge won't even recognise them as CDs. It's as if it's turning up its nose at such cheap efforts.

My big problem now is...I just changed my car. When I asked 'does this one have a CD player?' the mid-twenties sales person looked at me slightly aghast and said (words to the effect of) 'I'm sorry sir...a 'C-what' player? Do you not possess a mobile phone?'

So now I can't even play CDs in the car. Which is a shame, given that I own 3000 of them. :(
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krm
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Re: New album Hey Clockface will be released October 30, 2020

Post by krm »

Hawksmoor wrote:
My big problem now is...I just changed my car. When I asked 'does this one have a CD player?' the mid-twenties sales person looked at me slightly aghast and said (words to the effect of) 'I'm sorry sir...a 'C-what' player? Do you not possess a mobile phone?'

So now I can't even play CDs in the car. Which is a shame, given that I own 3000 of them. :(
Ha! When I bought a new car last year I insisted to buy and get a CDplayer installed. When they asked "why?" I just answered: to play CDs. The salesguy was smart enough to recognize a missing deal if ignored this request, so I got my self a CD player in the new car. In addition to this I was the lauging stock of the month in the office, when telling the colleagues about it. Well worth it!
jardine
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Re: New album Hey Clockface will be released October 30, 2020

Post by jardine »

"Unfortunately, due to covid-19 related production delays all vinyl variants are running a couple weeks behind. The new expected ship date for vinyl orders is now November 13. We apologize for the inconvenience.

You will still receive your digital download of "Hey Clockface" at midnight on Oct. 30th."
Ulster Boy
Posts: 317
Joined: Mon Sep 18, 2006 3:27 pm

Re: New album Hey Clockface will be released October 30, 2020

Post by Ulster Boy »

Hawksmoor wrote:
sulky lad wrote:On a couple of reviews that I read, the most noticeable effect was playing these on "lo-fi" players rather than at the high end of the spectrum. One reviewer said he noticed the difference most in his car rather than on his £22K CD player
I always felt that this and SACD was a ploy for hi-fi snobs and a bit of a catchpenny but those reviews do seem a bit more realistic. however, the odds are much higher that you'll scratch or damage your CD by playing it in the car rather than just using it in a home hi-fi set up ( research courtesy of Dr. MWP - my son , probably hearsay !)) It seems a bit like the difference between chrome ( slightly upmarket) and metal cassettes (super elite) back in the 70s. :wink:
Interesting stuff. I don't think my ears are good enough these days to really detect much difference in sound quality (and certainly not enough to seriously affect my enjoyment, for better or for worse).

What I have noticed is...I have a lot of home-burned CDS (many of them EC). These have always played fine in the car, and fine on the cheap-as-chips/basic-as-you-like DVD player (through the TV). But my state-of-the-art Technics CD player in the lounge won't even recognise them as CDs. It's as if it's turning up its nose at such cheap efforts.

My big problem now is...I just changed my car. When I asked 'does this one have a CD player?' the mid-twenties sales person looked at me slightly aghast and said (words to the effect of) 'I'm sorry sir...a 'C-what' player? Do you not possess a mobile phone?'

So now I can't even play CDs in the car. Which is a shame, given that I own 3000 of them. :(
Same here, so ripped to usb stick, actually more convenient and less clutter in the car. Except I hardly ever drive anywhere anymore. Still prefer cd’s on the main home system.
sweetest punch
Posts: 5961
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Re: New album Hey Clockface will be released October 30, 2020

Post by sweetest punch »

Album reviewed in Mojo 325: https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/moj ... -bob-dylan

(...)
REVIEWED Joni Mitchell / Bruce Springsteen / Nick Cave / Kraftwerk / Gillian Welch / Eels / Gorillaz / Jeff Tweedy / U2 / Jim White / Gwenifer Raymond / The Style Council / John Lennon / Melody Gardot / Elvis Costello / Trees / Autechre / The Divine Comedy / Bob Mould / Eddie Chacon
Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.
sulky lad
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Joined: Fri Jul 29, 2005 5:21 pm
Location: Out of the kitchen,she's gone with the wind

Re: New album Hey Clockface will be released October 30, 2020

Post by sulky lad »

Ulster Boy wrote:
Hawksmoor wrote:
sulky lad wrote:On a couple of reviews that I read, the most noticeable effect was playing these on "lo-fi" players rather than at the high end of the spectrum. One reviewer said he noticed the difference most in his car rather than on his £22K CD player
I always felt that this and SACD was a ploy for hi-fi snobs and a bit of a catchpenny but those reviews do seem a bit more realistic. however, the odds are much higher that you'll scratch or damage your CD by playing it in the car rather than just using it in a home hi-fi set up ( research courtesy of Dr. MWP - my son , probably hearsay !)) It seems a bit like the difference between chrome ( slightly upmarket) and metal cassettes (super elite) back in the 70s. :wink:
Interesting stuff. I don't think my ears are good enough these days to really detect much difference in sound quality (and certainly not enough to seriously affect my enjoyment, for better or for worse).

What I have noticed is...I have a lot of home-burned CDS (many of them EC). These have always played fine in the car, and fine on the cheap-as-chips/basic-as-you-like DVD player (through the TV). But my state-of-the-art Technics CD player in the lounge won't even recognise them as CDs. It's as if it's turning up its nose at such cheap efforts.

My big problem now is...I just changed my car. When I asked 'does this one have a CD player?' the mid-twenties sales person looked at me slightly aghast and said (words to the effect of) 'I'm sorry sir...a 'C-what' player? Do you not possess a mobile phone?'

So now I can't even play CDs in the car. Which is a shame, given that I own 3000 of them. :(
Same here, so ripped to usb stick, actually more convenient and less clutter in the car. Except I hardly ever drive anywhere anymore. Still prefer cd’s on the main home system.
Fortunately everyone drives so slowly down here that i can still play vinyl on my mobile record player with nary a skip ! :wink:
sweetest punch
Posts: 5961
Joined: Sat Apr 03, 2004 5:49 am
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Re: New album Hey Clockface will be released October 30, 2020

Post by sweetest punch »

https://www.aroundthesound.com.au/poetr ... -costello/

POETRY AND POISE: THE ECLECTIC NEW OFFERING FROM ELVIS COSTELLO

From the first enchanting notes of ‘Revolution #49,’ I find myself standing alone in a barren landscape, encircled by desert winds. To my left is a serpent (instrument, not snake), behind me the low rumblings of cello and piano, to my right a wailing cor anglais. The tone is dirty, not desolate, rasping yet rich – then there’s Costello’s voice emerging from the sand.

Costello takes the opportunity to offer up gentler moments of vulnerability and fragility – the occasional crack in his falsetto, a vibrato so tender it would make an iron bar weep

The land was white, the wind a dagger / Life beats a poor man to his grave / Love makes a rich man from a beggar / Love is the one thing we can save.

I settle in, committed. I could do two more hours of this. But the mood set by the opening number of Elvis Costello’s latest offering, Hey Clockface, is quickly turned on its head by the second track.

It’s hard to grasp Costello’s intention with this album. A winding journey of genres fourteen songs deep and only slightly too long for vinyl, it hints at an approach catering to a modern audience that listens to single tracks embedded in Spotify playlists, rather than a cohesive body of work for the remaining purists among us to embrace with headphones in the dark. Yet there is so much to embrace.

Recorded in Helsinki, Paris and New York, the album dips in and out of rock, pop and jazz, with Middle Eastern and ragtime flavours, peppered with the occasional poetry and spoken word.

Remarkably, Costello only began the recording process in February. After laying down a few solo tracks at Suomenlinnan Studio in Helsinki, he immediately set sail for Paris to form a quintet at Les Studios Saint Germain. “I sang live on the studio floor,” he says, “directing from the vocal booth. We cut nine songs in two days. We spoke very little. Almost everything the musicians played was a spontaneous response to the song I was singing. I’d had a dream of recording in Paris like this, one day.”

The result is a confluence of strings, woodwinds, a jiving brass section and percussion, at times providing the kind of soundscape one associates with a smoky jazz bar. Mellow saxophones, clarinets and trumpets blend seamlessly with acoustic and tremolo guitar, piano, sparse vocal harmonies and an organ that at times evokes memories of 80s synth pads – there’s even a flugel horn.

That’s not to say it has something for everyone, but with its alternatively relaxed and driving rhythms, boldness and beauty, darkness and light, it has something for every aspect of anyone with an artistic temperament or a halfway sensitive soul. “I wanted the record to be vivid,” he says, “whether the songs demanded playing that was loud and jagged or intimate and beautiful.”

The New York sessions completed the recording before the tracks were sent to Los Angeles to be mixed by Sebastian Krys, who worked with Costello on the GRAMMY® award winning album, Look Now. Krys is certainly a master of his craft. The instruments are nicely spaced around the listener, each timbre present but never encroaching, so that even when a track is heavily layered, it never feels cluttered.

Lyrically, Costello toys with social commentary and self-reflection or, as he calls it, “peace, love and misunderstanding” (You’ll see my photo beside the article / “That’s just some guy I used to know”). With such wide musical range, one of the key elements tying the album together is the poetic nature of the lyrics, not least in the storytelling style of modern folk ballad, ‘Newspaper Pane.’

The beaus with their fiddles played “The Rascal’s Release.”
We toasted to valor and wished there were peace.
Six months later in a newspaper margin,
They were all cut down in a cavalry charge.
Weeping Miss Imogen said to her priest,
I gave him my virtue. It was the least
I could leave him on the eve of departure,
Though I will long for him now and hereafter.
And the child I’ll be raising may have his blue eyes
What if he grows up and dies
On some distant unnameable hillside or field
Because a king and a concubine put a mark on his shield?


At times intimate, at times political – She dragged my face from the eye to my lip on the rough side of the striking strip / To the port side of a sinking ship /… You don’t need to see my face / Radio is everything – the realm where Costello really shines is in the ballads.

With gorgeous melodies and colourful chord changes reminiscent of poignant moments in Broadway musicals, there’s a nostalgic sense that we’ve heard these songs before. The arrangements are simple, allowing the vocal to take centre stage, and Costello takes the opportunity to offer up gentler moments of vulnerability and fragility – the occasional crack in his falsetto, a vibrato so tender it would make an iron bar weep.

‘I Do (Zula’s Song)’ and ‘The Last Confession of Vivian Whip’ fall into this category but the album’s standout track for me is piano ballad, ‘The Whirlwind.’ It’s the kind of song that makes you stop what you’re doing just to experience it. With Costello’s raspy voice, a wailing trumpet and a tinge of regret, it’s an anthem for anyone who’s ever had a dream – a song so moving, I can’t help but wonder why it didn’t earn the album’s title.

A work of examination and reflection, Hey Clockface has the feel of a dusty, discovered journal providing insight into some of the more personal moments of Costello’s life. As for his dream?

When the last of the garlands and laurel crowns and fine bouquets have all been swept away … Where will you find the courage to say, “They’re not laughing at me now?”
Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.
jardine
Posts: 801
Joined: Sat Sep 11, 2010 12:59 pm

Re: New album Hey Clockface will be released October 30, 2020

Post by jardine »

that is a really good review, atmospheric, elegant.

if i may add: Aminah Hughes
sweetest punch
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Re: New album Hey Clockface will be released October 30, 2020

Post by sweetest punch »

https://www.smh.com.au/culture/music/mu ... 566dj.html

Elvis Costello

HEY CLOCKFACE (Concord)

★★★

A lot of people – and this reviewer pleads guilty – want Elvis Costello to remain stuck in amber circa 1977-1983. It’s unfair, of course. The knock-kneed motormouth punched out a remarkable run of records that grew out of punk but were way too smart to be confined by it. From collaborating with Burt Bacharach to writing a ballet score, he’s always thumbed his nose at straitjackets. Recorded in Helsinki, Paris and New York, Hey Clockface is a sometimes disjointed experience. No Flag uses Tom Waits-ian junkyard percussion and distortion to drive sneering lines such as, “No God for the damn that I don’t give”; Byline is a gorgeously wrought kiss-off ballad where old letters house painful memories. On the title track's show-tune shadings, he does his best imitation of his old hero Randy Newman, while the thump-and-crunch of Hetty O’Hara Confidential crosses Dylan-esque syntax with rap-like delivery. Between the blooms there are weeds: blousy spoken-word poetry over brooding orchestration, a convoluted ballad or two where his voice cracks and creaks. But even when he fails to take flight, he continues to avoid being pinned down.
Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.
sulky lad
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Joined: Fri Jul 29, 2005 5:21 pm
Location: Out of the kitchen,she's gone with the wind

Re: New album Hey Clockface will be released October 30, 2020

Post by sulky lad »

sweetest punch wrote:https://www.aroundthesound.com.au/poetr ... -costello/

POETRY AND POISE: THE ECLECTIC NEW OFFERING FROM ELVIS COSTELLO

From the first enchanting notes of ‘Revolution #49,’ I find myself standing alone in a barren landscape, encircled by desert winds. To my left is a serpent (instrument, not snake), behind me the low rumblings of cello and piano, to my right a wailing cor anglais. The tone is dirty, not desolate, rasping yet rich – then there’s Costello’s voice emerging from the sand.

Costello takes the opportunity to offer up gentler moments of vulnerability and fragility – the occasional crack in his falsetto, a vibrato so tender it would make an iron bar weep

The land was white, the wind a dagger / Life beats a poor man to his grave / Love makes a rich man from a beggar / Love is the one thing we can save.

I settle in, committed. I could do two more hours of this. But the mood set by the opening number of Elvis Costello’s latest offering, Hey Clockface, is quickly turned on its head by the second track.

It’s hard to grasp Costello’s intention with this album. A winding journey of genres fourteen songs deep and only slightly too long for vinyl, it hints at an approach catering to a modern audience that listens to single tracks embedded in Spotify playlists, rather than a cohesive body of work for the remaining purists among us to embrace with headphones in the dark. Yet there is so much to embrace.

Recorded in Helsinki, Paris and New York, the album dips in and out of rock, pop and jazz, with Middle Eastern and ragtime flavours, peppered with the occasional poetry and spoken word.

Remarkably, Costello only began the recording process in February. After laying down a few solo tracks at Suomenlinnan Studio in Helsinki, he immediately set sail for Paris to form a quintet at Les Studios Saint Germain. “I sang live on the studio floor,” he says, “directing from the vocal booth. We cut nine songs in two days. We spoke very little. Almost everything the musicians played was a spontaneous response to the song I was singing. I’d had a dream of recording in Paris like this, one day.”

The result is a confluence of strings, woodwinds, a jiving brass section and percussion, at times providing the kind of soundscape one associates with a smoky jazz bar. Mellow saxophones, clarinets and trumpets blend seamlessly with acoustic and tremolo guitar, piano, sparse vocal harmonies and an organ that at times evokes memories of 80s synth pads – there’s even a flugel horn.

That’s not to say it has something for everyone, but with its alternatively relaxed and driving rhythms, boldness and beauty, darkness and light, it has something for every aspect of anyone with an artistic temperament or a halfway sensitive soul. “I wanted the record to be vivid,” he says, “whether the songs demanded playing that was loud and jagged or intimate and beautiful.”

The New York sessions completed the recording before the tracks were sent to Los Angeles to be mixed by Sebastian Krys, who worked with Costello on the GRAMMY® award winning album, Look Now. Krys is certainly a master of his craft. The instruments are nicely spaced around the listener, each timbre present but never encroaching, so that even when a track is heavily layered, it never feels cluttered.

Lyrically, Costello toys with social commentary and self-reflection or, as he calls it, “peace, love and misunderstanding” (You’ll see my photo beside the article / “That’s just some guy I used to know”). With such wide musical range, one of the key elements tying the album together is the poetic nature of the lyrics, not least in the storytelling style of modern folk ballad, ‘Newspaper Pane.’

The beaus with their fiddles played “The Rascal’s Release.”
We toasted to valor and wished there were peace.
Six months later in a newspaper margin,
They were all cut down in a cavalry charge.
Weeping Miss Imogen said to her priest,
I gave him my virtue. It was the least
I could leave him on the eve of departure,
Though I will long for him now and hereafter.
And the child I’ll be raising may have his blue eyes
What if he grows up and dies
On some distant unnameable hillside or field
Because a king and a concubine put a mark on his shield?


At times intimate, at times political – She dragged my face from the eye to my lip on the rough side of the striking strip / To the port side of a sinking ship /… You don’t need to see my face / Radio is everything – the realm where Costello really shines is in the ballads.

With gorgeous melodies and colourful chord changes reminiscent of poignant moments in Broadway musicals, there’s a nostalgic sense that we’ve heard these songs before. The arrangements are simple, allowing the vocal to take centre stage, and Costello takes the opportunity to offer up gentler moments of vulnerability and fragility – the occasional crack in his falsetto, a vibrato so tender it would make an iron bar weep.

‘I Do (Zula’s Song)’ and ‘The Last Confession of Vivian Whip’ fall into this category but the album’s standout track for me is piano ballad, ‘The Whirlwind.’ It’s the kind of song that makes you stop what you’re doing just to experience it. With Costello’s raspy voice, a wailing trumpet and a tinge of regret, it’s an anthem for anyone who’s ever had a dream – a song so moving, I can’t help but wonder why it didn’t earn the album’s title.

A work of examination and reflection, Hey Clockface has the feel of a dusty, discovered journal providing insight into some of the more personal moments of Costello’s life. As for his dream?

When the last of the garlands and laurel crowns and fine bouquets have all been swept away … Where will you find the courage to say, “They’re not laughing at me now?”

Thank f*** there are some reviewers actually listening to the music rather than coming in with their preconceived ideas of the album they expect him to make - bravo!
sweetest punch
Posts: 5961
Joined: Sat Apr 03, 2004 5:49 am
Location: Belgium

Re: New album Hey Clockface will be released October 30, 2020

Post by sweetest punch »

https://theartsdesk.com/new-music/album ... -clockface

Album: Elvis Costello - Hey Clockface

Good songs, poor intonation

Elvis Costello’s was the last major concert before lockdown. At Hammersmith, I remember the feeling, a last hurrah as we stared into the abyss and the inescapable thought that we must have been experiencing something akin to what our parents and grandparents felt in early 1939. Like them we cannot have understood the perils that lay ahead, or the losses.

Fearful of the risks faced by his team and his audience, Costello abandoned the tour with a few dates still to go and headed home to Vancouver where in lockdown he worked on tracks he’d already set down in sessions in Helsinki, Paris (where he was backed by a jazz ensemble, dubbed Le Quintette Saint Germain) and New York. Mixing was done in Los Angeles by Sebastian Krys, who worked with Costello on the Grammy-winning Look Now.

Costello has said that he wanted Hey Clockface to be “vivid, whether the songs demanded playing that was loud and jagged or intimate and beautiful.” There have been five single releases from the album, which is indeed vivid, and diverse – perhaps disjointed, depending on your point of view. It doesn’t cohere into one sound, or one approach, so there’s no relaxing into it. “Revolution #49”, the opening track, is a melange of Arabic-inflected wind, strings and percussion over which Costello recites, the most insistent lines “love is the one thing we can save”. A surprising opener, its title hinting at something more raucous. However, the punky, jagged textures and lyrics of a song such as “No Flag” are at odds with the “intimate and beautiful” numbers which are the ones that leave a lasting impression.

There are some gorgeous melodies and striking chord progressions, and some heart-wrenching lyrics – “Newspaper Pane” is a case in point, a reminder that Costello was one of the greatest singer-songwriters to emerge from Britain in the 1980s.. “I Do (Zula’s Song)” harks back melodically to “Shipbuilding” (from 1983’s Punch the Clock), piano, brass and strings adding a funereal tone. Costello’s distinctive baritone is out front – sometimes tremulous, the falsetto uncertain, as in “The Whirlwind”, a piano ballad with delicious cello counterpoint and brass interpolations. “The Last Confession of Vivian Whip” is another beauty, with a retro almost hymn-like quality. The jagged rap of “Hetty O’Hara Confidential”, sequenced between those two numbers, rather sadly destroys the atmosphere.

“What Is It That I Need That I Don’t Already have?” is another good song, but a beauteous arrangement cannot disguise the distracting off-key-ness of the vocal. “Radio is Everything” is spoken, the imagery unsettling, while “I Can’t Say Her Name” is the sort of nostalgic soft-shoe shuffle that could have come from the pen of Paul McCartney.

There are some lovely moments on Hey Clockface but rather too much is marred by poor intonation. Sadly, Elvis’s aim just isn’t true enough.
Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.
sweetest punch
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Re: New album Hey Clockface will be released October 30, 2020

Post by sweetest punch »

https://www.google.be/amp/s/www.vulture ... ofile.html

This Year’s Model Elvis Costello is back with his 31st (or so) studio album. But don’t look for any consolation from him.

I know where the bodies are buried and the choices that I can’t or won’t take,” Elvis Costello tells me with utter conviction and without going into the specifics. He’s sitting under a photograph of a young Aretha Franklin in mid-song and cradling what appears to be a Fender bass guitar, which he seems to be on the verge of playing but never does. He’s outside Vancouver, where he lives with his wife, the jazz pianist and singer Diana Krall, and their two 13-year-old sons, and I’m on my front porch in Syracuse talking to him through my computer screen. We are both wearing black sweaters and specs. Sometimes I wear a hat, as he does. Maybe I’d be dressed this way if I had never heard Costello, but this person was still the same character who grabbed hold of me at age 14 and never let go.

For millions of spectacle wearers like me who came of age in the 1980s, if you put on an Elvis Costello record, it all comes rushing back: your adolescent bile and angst, the pique of every slight, your ex-friends and ex-lovers. It’s an awkward thing to try to thank him for, so I don’t. He was born Declan MacManus in London in 1954 and, thanks to his bandleader father, had access to the latest records: Joni Mitchell’s Song to a Seagull, Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow, Charles Mingus’s Oh Yeah, along with Marvin and Tammi, Lou Rawls, Frank Sinatra, Muddy Waters, Louis Armstrong, and on and on.

“I’ve been lucky to have access to stacks of records pocket money couldn’t have afforded me,” he tells me. “By the time I was 13, 14, I was saving money to buy a guitar, but after that, every penny I spent was on records. I never bought clothes.”

Some of the records had sounds he could never reproduce. Others demonstrated a way into who he could become. “The singer I wanted to be like when I was a kid was Levi Stubbs,” he says. “I wanted to have that kind of voice, like a stun gun, you know, but Rick Danko had a kind of desperation in his voice, with that nervous, like, throw-yourself-at-it way that he did. He was a very fearless singer.”

Desperation. Nervousness. Young Declan took it all in. You could take your vulnerabilities as far as rock and roll could allow, even beyond rock and roll when you wanted to. His adenoidal singing voice is not perfect, but it delivers catharsis. And in this pandemic — which cut short his tour in mid-March; he flew back from London to Canada while he still could — who couldn’t use some?

“My vibrato is actually an affliction,” he says when we discuss his distinctive singing on ballads. “It’s because I have a heart murmur. And I think it affects my breathing.”

Pause. I didn’t know this.

“But emotionally, it’s so right for the material,” he says.

“Well, there were no held notes in my early material, so nobody knew I had it till tempos dropped a little bit and it came out. I have certain limitations in my breathing. It’s like being color-blind. You can have an appreciation of art and be color-blind. You can read when you’re shortsighted. You take everything that happens in stride.”

Costello always sounds like he’s in a battle. And, growing up, many of us felt that he was battling for us. Take “Pump It Up,” a 1978 angry-young-man classic. It used to surface at basketball games, although its subject is not about scoring but what happens when one doesn’t: “Pump it up, until you can feel it / Pump it up, when you don’t really need it.”

And now he’s even given us a bleak, defiant pandemic anthem: “No Flag,” on which he sings: “I got no religion, I got no philosophy / got a head full of ideas and words that don’t seem to belong to me.” It was the first track to drop from Hey Clockface, which, depending on who is doing the counting, is Costello’s 31st studio album, out October 30. Costello’s indignant muse is still going.

A girlfriend once told me that Costello sounded to her like the angry guy masturbating on the other side of the door. Which is a creepy image and not something anybody wants to think about. Male sexual frustration has gone from being an acceptably ubiquitous font of artistic inspiration to something that sounds like incel, and whether or not that is entirely fair, the culture has more important injustices on its mind, and that is okay.

Earlier this year, Costello won his second Grammy for Look Now, a collection of what he calls “uptown pop,” released shortly after a cancer scare, for which he had successful surgery. The music — belted out, brooded, crooned — continues apace. In an early interview, as a 22-year-old seeking attention in 1977, he proclaimed all of his songs come from “revenge and guilt,” knowing that he had already revealed his tenderness in “Alison,” a song about trying to make a woman’s pain go away with a refrain that still resounds in his most recent live performances: “My aim is true.”

Over the years, Costello became expeditionary, taking us loyal fans along with him. If you were someone who loved This Year’s Model in brutal youth, then sought out jazz, bluegrass, country, and classical, you would find Costello wrote in all of these genres, and that voice of umbrage was unmistakable everywhere he went. Pushing 40, he learned to drive, speak Italian, and finally read music.

Costello charted more in the U.K. than in America but still sometimes floated into the mainstream here. “Everyday I Write the Book” (1983) became an MTV hit and can still be heard in supermarkets. His recordings of “She” (from the credits of Notting Hill) and “(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace Love and Understanding” are perhaps his best-known tracks, even though he wrote neither of them.

He is on record trashing the royal family and writing a song, “Tramp the Dirt Down,” about dancing on Margaret Thatcher’s grave, yet he is now an OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire) — on receiving the honor, he mentioned that his mum thought Prime Minister Theresa May was “rubbish.” When the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame honored him years ago, he thanked Franz Schubert.

Our conversation is not only about Costello’s own music but, just as much, about why the Dylan of Triplicate and “Murder Most Foul” should be considered a great singer (as a Sinatra-league storyteller, not in the America’s Got Talent sense), how the late period of Leonard Cohen knocked him out, his amazement at watching Count Basie play a piano solo from a few feet away, how he at 16 was transfigured by a performance of Joni Mitchell singing the Blue songs in Manchester before they were on record, why Lou Reed kissed him on both cheeks after a performance on the Letterman show, and how he wrote songs with Paul McCartney, always harmonizing on the lower end, trying not to evoke the Beatles, until they couldn’t help themselves and did it anyway. There is so much to say, and even more clues about where the bodies are buried. But don’t expect him to do the digging for you.

“I don’t really read the backstories of people,” he says.

“Should people read the backstory of you?” I ask.

“I don’t care. They could read the backstory I wrote. Half of it’s lies.”

“But you reveal so much in the music.”

“Or do I?”

On the screen, I can see my reflection and crumbling porch in his trademark specs. I guess he can see himself. Does he see me reading his backstory? Does he care?

The truth is Elvis is not only the soundtrack to our spotty and frustrated backstories; for many of us, he embodies the backstories. He is the thing that we wished we could have said in the moment but would have regretted if we had. He reminds us of our resentments and our lack of nerve — the unsent message, the unreturned call, the voice in our head that tells us to want the wrong person and to want that person so badly it could kill us. (His last album has a song called “Unwanted Number.”) He is the thing we really want to do but can’t and, in any case, probably shouldn’t. That voice still reminds us of all we didn’t have the courage to be and the regret that there was some even deeper desire somewhere for an outcome that would surely be the worst of all.

It is more natural to talk about the songs that express these feelings than the feelings themselves. In songs like “I Want You,” from Blood & Chocolate (1986), one element that sets Costello apart is palpable sexual jealousy:

I want you
It’s the stupid details that my heart is breaking for
It’s the way your shoulders shake and what they’re shaking for
I want you
It’s knowing that he knows you now after only guessing
It’s the thought of him undressing you or you undressing


These are not hard lyrics to decode. It’s like an open wound. But Costello doesn’t want to talk about its emotional content. He wants to talk about songwriting almost in a technical sense. He mentions that two of his favorite artists — Dylan and Lennon — had songs called “I Want You” first. He listened very closely. “You have to distinguish between what is communicating an emotional truth and what is just a tantrum,” he says. “The Lennon ‘I Want You’ repeats the title probably as much as my song does. That song is a carnal celebration. My song is the opposite. I think it’s more interesting now for me to regard it in the past. When I come upon it, I come upon it like an actor who has to play a role that’s been written down. It’s a litany. You’re obsessive sounding, and the melodies are very simple, but it keeps landing on this very unexpected minor chord that doesn’t fit. There are certain choices in there. It’s not just a raw spontaneous wailing.”

“No Flag,” off the new album, feels appropriate to this long, sinking moment. “The song was written before the turn of the year, and it’s something I’d been thinking on for a while,” he says. “Just the idea that there are days when other circumstances than the ones we are living through now get you to the edge, like, on the precipice — whatever that precipice is. Where it’s … nothing satisfies you. No philosophical idea, no theological idea, no allegiance. None of it is consoling.”

He continues, “That’s the reason to write the song. Oddly enough, it was a really joyful experience to make the record, because I was in Helsinki,” a choice he made because “I wanted to literally go somewhere I’d never been and start to make a rock-and-roll record without a blueprint. Make everything on the record a drum, and my voice is a drum, drum machine is a drum, the organ is a drum, the guitar is a drum. There’s no bass until the chorus, so everything in the first minute and a half, two minutes of the record is a drum.”

“Do you feel that way in real life?” I ask.

“What, everything is a drum?”

“No, no. No flag, no God, no religion …”

“Not every single day, obviously, but the days you do feel like that, there should be a theme song for it. So that is the theme song for it, you know?”

On another song, “We’re All Cowards Now,” I was getting concerned that Elvis, in this haunting A-minor blues — that could be in a mash-up with “Summertime” and “Bad Guy” — was lamenting that the government was coming for our guns:

They’re coming for our Peacemakers
Our Winchesters and Colts
The rattle of our Gatling guns
Our best cowboy revolts and threats and insults


Which sounds a bit … right-wing paranoid, maybe? I ask him if he owns a gun. He says, “Me? I will not touch a gun.”

“But there are guns all over the lyrics to that song.”

“They’re all over the world.”

“But it sounds like you’re saying that people are coming for our guns, but we’re all cowards.”

“Well, it doesn’t really matter what I think or do. I’m singing about somebody who’s fearful. There’s that line, ‘They’re draping stones with colors and a roll of stolen names, except those we never cared about and those we need to blame.’ We’re very selective about who we mourn. We mourn the victims of outrages, but when the outrages are done in our name, we don’t mourn the names of the people that are killed. The repetitive nature of revenge and hatred is such that we do that at our peril, because eventually, it rebounds.”

Elvis can’t go anywhere anymore, not even to visit his older son or 93-year-old mum in the U.K. Nobody’s out on tour, the concert halls are closed, and yet he works on, with a musical based on Elia Kazan’s film A Face in the Crowd, a three-part comedic drama, an audio pamphlet about making music, a Spanish-language album, music for Tommy McLain and Rodney Crowell, and secrets he’s keeping under his hat. Don’t start me talking; I could talk all night.

He may evolve, he may age, he may be knighted, but he is also, for many of us, the one who made us think he knows who we really are. His voice is the one that says, I know this world is killing you. But in the end, we are just left with ourselves. Elvis can’t tell us our secrets any more than anyone else. He’s not going to tell us. And yet he knew I had to ask.

“So where are the bodies buried?”

Pause.

He smiles. If we talked forever, we’d never get there. “I’m not going to tell you that,” he says, “because that’s what I have to know in order to sing them!”


——————————-///
*This article appears in the October 26, 2020, issue of New York Magazine.
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: New album Hey Clockface will be released October 30, 2020

Post by sweetest punch »

https://www.humo.be/muziek/hey-clockfac ... ~b7e4a10c/

‘Hey Clockface’ krijgt drie sterren naar Elvis Costello’s hoge normen, vijf naar die van mindere goden

4 stars

Als een Engelse blanke westerse artiest zijn plaat opent met oosterse, zeg maar Arabische klanken, en die monoloog 'Revolution #49' noemt (naar analogie van Lennons 'Revolution #9'), dan is dat een statement. Als dat parlando-statement ('Love is the one thing we can save') wordt gevolgd door een felle song die 'No Flag' heet ('I've got no religion / (...) I sense no future / (...) I've got no illusions'), dan wordt het een driedubbel statement. Die driedubbele volley lijkt een update van Costello's '(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding', opgepept met een dubbele dosis verontwaardiging. Tegen extremisten, religieuze fanatici en The Donald, voor redelijkheid, openheid en verdraagzaamheid. Ook uit andere songs ('We Are All Cowards Now', 'The Whirlwind') leid je af: het zit Elvis duidelijk hoog, op maatschappelijk en persoonlijk vlak.

De rest van deze 'Hey Clockface' kiest afwisselend voor strelen en slaan. Er zijn mooie ballads en venijnige rockers in minstens vijf genres, maar schijn bedriegt vaak en Costello blijft Costello: melig wordt het nooit, altijd heeft een traag sfeervol nummer ook een scherp randje of een verontrustende ondertoon. Er is, misschien, één verwijzing naar de kanker die hem twee jaar geleden bijna velde: 'Time is my enemy, and it is hurting me so'. En iedereen krijgt ervan langs, de sociale media voorop ('Now everyone has a megaphone'). Het enige minpunt is dat, zoals ook Bob Dylan en rappers-activisten te vaak doen, Costello af en toe eindeloze politiek bewuste en correcte teksten uitgiet over een minder geslaagde riff, zoals op 'Newspaper Pane'. Dan wordt zo'n protestsong een monotoon essay, terwijl je een kleurrijke roman wilde lezen. Drie sterren naar zijn hoge normen, vijf naar die van mindere goden.
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: New album Hey Clockface will be released October 30, 2020

Post by sweetest punch »

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: New album Hey Clockface will be released October 30, 2020

Post by sweetest punch »

https://www.google.be/amp/s/k.at/amp/en ... /401078112

Elvis Costello mag's auf neuem Album "lebendig"

In Helsinki, Paris und New York aufgenommen, in Los Angeles gemischt: Die Entstehungsgeschichte von Elvis Costellos neuem Album "Hey Clockface", das am 30. Oktober erscheint, ist bewegt. Auch die Besetzung u. a. mit Klavier, Trompete und Klarinette auf einigen Songs klingt spannend, anderswo wirkt der Sound allerdings sperrig elektronisch. "Ich wollte, dass die Platte lebendig ist - egal ob die Songs laut und zackig oder intim und schön gespielt wurden", sagte Costello dazu.

Und so unberechenbar ist diese Platte dann insgesamt: nicht homogen dem Wohlklang verpflichtet wie zuletzt noch "Look Now" (2018) - dafür bunter, experimenteller, mit Ausflügen Richtung Jazz, Funk oder Spoken-Word. Sogar eine gewisse Punk-Wut ist beim früheren New-Wave-Pionier Costello noch zu spüren ("No Flag"), während sich der 66-Jährige in famosen Balladen ganz auf den gereiften Schmelz seiner einst durchaus polarisierenden Stimme verlassen kann.

In Piano-Stücken wie "The Whirlwind" oder "The Last Confession Of Vivian Whip" ist die Verbindung zum Grammy-dekorierten Vorgängeralbum noch spürbar, obwohl Costello diesmal nicht mit Easy-Listening-Ikone Burt Bacharach zusammengearbeitet hat. Stattdessen wurden die New Yorker Sessions vom Arrangeur und Trompeter Michael Leonhart zusammen mit den Gitarristen Bill Frisell und Nels Cline (Wilco) betreut.

Costellos Alben der 70er und 80er Jahre tauchen in vielen "ewigen Bestenlisten" der Rockmusik auf. Der gewohnt kluge, gediegene Songwriter-Pop dieses Musikers wird auf "Hey Clockface" zum Ausgangspunkt für eine stilistische Tour de Force.

Mit dem nostalgisch-atmosphärischen "Radio Is Everything" und dem wunderschönen Closer "Byline" hat Costello zudem zwei besonders meisterliche Songs komponiert. Der Brite, der vor zwei Jahren seine Fans mit einer Krebsdiagnose geschockt hatte, steht also hoffentlich vor einem großen, noch sehr umfangreichen Alterswerk.

——————————
Google translation:

Elvis Costello likes it "alive" on the new album

Recorded in Helsinki, Paris and New York, mixed in Los Angeles: the genesis of Elvis Costello's new album "Hey Clockface", which will be released on October 30th, is moving. The cast u. a. with piano, trumpet and clarinet on some songs sounds exciting, but elsewhere the sound is bulky electronic. "I wanted the record to be alive - regardless of whether the songs were played loud and jagged or intimate and beautiful," said Costello.


And that is how unpredictable this record is overall: not homogeneously committed to euphoria like "Look Now" (2018) last but more colorful, experimental, with excursions towards jazz, funk or spoken word. Even a certain punk rage can still be felt in the former New Wave pioneer Costello ("No Flag"), while the 66-year-old can rely on the matured melting of his once polarizing voice in famous ballads.

In piano pieces like "The Whirlwind" or "The Last Confession Of Vivian Whip" the connection to the Grammy-awarded previous album can still be felt, although this time Costello did not work with easy-listening icon Burt Bacharach. Instead, the New York sessions were supervised by arranger and trumpeter Michael Leonhart together with guitarists Bill Frisell and Nels Cline (Wilco).

Costello's albums from the 70s and 80s appear in many of the "eternal best lists" of rock music. The usual clever, dignified songwriter pop of this musician becomes the starting point for a stylistic tour de force on "Hey Clockface".

With the nostalgic-atmospheric "Radio Is Everything" and the beautiful closer "Byline", Costello has also composed two particularly masterful songs. The Briton, who shocked his fans with a cancer diagnosis two years ago, is hopefully facing a large, still very extensive, old work.
Since you put me down, it seems i've been very gloomy. You may laugh but pretty girls look right through me.
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