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Elvis Costello long ago reached that critical mass beyond which nothing he does is going to dramatically add to, or subtract from, his legacy. After all, his is a career that now encompasses six decades, a discography in excess of 30 studio albums, along with barely countable collaborations and excursions, and an expansive memoir chronicling it all (2015's terrific Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink). It is a giddy and liberating state that many artists of this rarefied stature never realise they've reached, but to Costello's considerable credit, he has spent his life acting as if he was born into it: little he has done since maybe 1979's Armed Forces has sounded like the work of someone much interested in what anybody else expected him to do.
Hey Clockface was recorded in three sessions — solo in Helsinki, remotely in New York and with a band in Paris. The latter comprises the bulk of the album, Costello in zestful cahoots with an ensemble including long-serving keyboardist Steve Nieve and French players of disparate musical backgrounds, informally christened Le Quintette Saint Germain. The first we hear of them is the gentle Arabic-sounding lilt that introduces "Revolution #49": a short, mostly spoken piece.
Following that brief — and, it turns out, deceptively placid — fanfare, proceedings kick up several notches into "No Flag," one of the tracks from the Helsinki sessions.
It catches Costello making a remarkable racket for one man, declaiming with splenetic abandon over clattering percussion and buzzsaw guitars, something like "Pump It Up" recast for the Blood & Chocolate era. However used we've become to it, there's still something singularly spectacular about Costello spitting venom, and this is the high-octane stuff: "No sign for the dark place that I live / No God for the damn that I don't give."
The other two Helsinki tracks are easy to pick from the lineup: "Hetty O'Hara Confidential" lurches along to twitching electronic drums and toytown keyboards as Costello recites one of his merciless character studies, in this instance of an old-school Hollywood gossip columnist, like a Hedda Hopper or Louella Parsons, though she's a foil for the observation that we are all tabloid reporters now ("Hetty said, 'I'm powerless and I feel alone / Now everyone has a megaphone'"). "We Are All Cowards Now," a discernible descendent of "Pills And Soap," is more solemn in pace, but no less furious in mood.
The two New York tracks were produced by the jazz trumpeter and Steely Dan/Yoko Ono (among others) sideman Michael Leonhart, with veteran avant-guitarists Bill Frisell and Nels Cline: Costello, marooned by Covid-19, contributed vocals remotely from his home in Vancouver. This pair of songs, "Newspaper Pane" and "Radio Is Everything," are — perhaps unsurprisingly — the two oddest things on the album. The former suggests a wilfully lo-fi take on Imperial Bedroom, and the lyric is one of Costello's intermittent rummages in the memory of a fictional dowager (see also "I Almost Had A Weakness," "Miss Macbeth"). The latter is another spoken-word soliloquy, set to crepuscular jazz, Costello muttering allusions to Orwell in the rueful but determined tone of a man about to throw back one more whisky and then solve this murder.
The nine songs from the Paris sessions were recorded over a weekend, largely live in the studio, and sound it, mostly for the best — vivacious, joyous and spontaneous. Somewhat counter-intuitively, however, on the rare occasions that the quality wavers, it's during the more upbeat moments: "I Can't Say Her Name," especially, while doubtless great fun to play, stumbles somewhat into jazz-hands whimsy. It also jars with much of the rest of Hey Clockface, which contains ballads fit to be bracketed with anything from Costello's 2003 torch songs collection North or Painted From Memory, his superb 1998 collaboration with Burt Bacharach.
"The Whirlwind" is an exquisite telling of longing and regret ("I've had my moments / But all too few") set to a gorgeous piano backing, Costello's husky vibrato cradling a simple but brutal lyric that could have served as a shattering show-stopper ("Nothing's lost and no-one's won / It's over now and now it's done"). However, Hey Clockface closes on a yet more sumptuous triumph. "Byline" is a thing of Jimmy Webb-esque poise and beauty, its narrator morosely contemplating a tear-stained bundle of yellowing billets-doux and both wondering and explaining where it all went wrong.
Given the nature of its assembly, Hey Clockface could have been forgiven for sounding disjointed, but it holds together remarkably well, and has an atmosphere at least as distinctive and beguiling as that of, say, Punch The Clock or The Juliet Letters. It isn't a typical Elvis Costello album, but then they never are.
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