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With last year's Secret, Profane & Sugarcane, Elvis Costello settled in with super-roots producer T Bone Burnett for an accomplished, if typically verbose, country-flavored acoustic set.
National Ransom goes deeper and wider, once again working with Americana players such as Jim Lauderdale and Jerry Douglas and Burnett helpmate Marc Ribot while also bringing in ringers such as Vince Gill and Leon Russell. Stylistically and narratively, the album is all over the place — from the aggressively rocking title cut about the financial crises in 1929 and 2008, to the quick-picking, bluegrass-flavored "Dr. Watson, I Presume," about meeting guitar great Doc Watson.
Is it all a bit much to digest, and could the 16-song set do with a bit of pruning? Absolutely, but it just as surely finds Costello working at an improbably high level 33 years after he debuted with My Aim Is True.
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