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Elvis Costello can write a well-wrought song with ease, but he usually doesn't just throw records out there. Momofuku, which takes its name from the inventor of instant noodles, is different. It's effortfully tossed off; it's a middling record battling against his built-in high standards.
Verifiable news about Momofuku first surfaced on Mr. Costello's website the day of the album's release on vinyl two weeks ago. (It comes out on CD this week.) The album started, Mr. Costello wrote in his post, when he contributed vocals to Jenny Lewis's next record, which also included Davey Faragher, Mr. Costello's regular bass player.
Mr. Costello then brought his drummer, Pete Thomas, into the picture and made his own record in a week, finishing the job less than three months ago. It involved a few other helpers, including Ms. Lewis, the singer-songwriter Johnathan Rice (Ms. Lewis's boyfriend) and Mr. Thomas's daughter Tennessee Thomas (also a drummer). Steve Nieve, another member of the Imposters, joined them on keyboards.
From time to time it sounds like Mr. Costello's early work. "No Hiding Place," a song about the loss of dignity in the world, flashes the wit and ill-humor of his younger days, though this is a middle-aged man's complaint. ("You can say anything you want to in your fetching cloak of anonymity," he sings. "Are you feeling out of breath now, in your desperate pursuit of infamy?") The Vox organ suffusing "American Gangster Time," and its drum rhythm, recalls "Radio, Radio," from Mr. Costello's 1978 album This Year's Model; the "In the Midnight Hour" bassline in "Go Away" sounds like something from Get Happy!! from 1980. There are hints of bossa nova and country and sophisticated '70s pop, though nothing here is a real genre exercise; the album is too low key for that.
For a record bashed out in a week — the kind of album in which the singer says, "Are we rolling?" and indicates to his band when to go to the bridge — Momofuku is not bare-bones. It has up to four backup singers and nine musicians at any given time, and sometimes a bit of space noise and backward effects in the guitars — the kind of thing done by indie-rockers with some time on their hands. But Mr. Costello determinedly allows imperfection with a small and squalid electric-guitar tone, his voice cracking and occasionally turning flat.
He is playing from within his own tradition and seemingly trying to make the act sound average and workaday. "Maybe this is nothing but drum and drone," he sings at one point. "Wanna beat it till I get unknown."
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