Fifty-one years into his career, Elvis Costello has not forgotten his roots. The songs on his 29th album, The Boy Named If, are bursting with pub-rock power and the kinds of stories you regale your fellow drinkers with five pints in – songs of the missteps and mischief of a boy turning into a man. And yes, at times it can feel as eye-rollingly irrelevant as that sounds.
The Boy Named If gets off to a rollicking start with the cuckolded “Farewell OK”, which has a boogie-woogie heart beating under a mess of guitars and snares thwacks.
It sets the stage for an album that isn’t going to hang about, and Costello rattles through the 13 tracks barely pausing for breath. The reflective “My Most Beautiful Mistake” is a brief respite, swapping thundering pace for sweet piano motifs while still managing to poke fun at itself, a potential lover saying she’s “seen your type before in courtroom sketches”.
At first I hated the sneering “Penelope Halfpenny”, with its chorus that sounds like your brother making fun of your best mate but, like many of the songs on this album, further listening made its irritating hooks into familiar strains that I couldn’t stop myself singing along to.
Similarly, “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love” sounds, to a certain ear, like a familiar old cop-out – devoted love dressed up as the sole requirement for a functioning relationship and set to a wall of crashing sound. Maybe that flew in the 70s but here in 2022 we need you to go to therapy, babes.
You get the sense that some of these songs have been a little overwritten. There is too much going on, too many ideas jostling for your ear, and it gives The Boy Named If a skittish, unfocused feel. It is a more satisfying listen when Costello and his band slow down, skim off the fat and keep things simple, as on “The Man You Love to Hate”.
There is a lot of fun to be had hearing Costello belt his way through – it just might be more manageable one song at a time.
Stream: Farewell OK, Mistook Me for a Friend, The Man You Love to Hate
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