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The title, and Tony Millionaire's cover art, suggest this ambitious album is Costello's response to the new austerity. In parts, it may be; the title track seems to fit Wall Street crashes of whichever decade. But there's much more besides. Produced, again, by T Bone Burnett, but veering away from the bluegrass stylings of Secret, Profane & Sugarcane, towards a kind of orchestrated R'n'B, with flurries of old-time whimsy, The Beatles gone gothic ("Church Underground") and vaudevillian storytelling, it's dense and sometimes obscure. The highpoint is "Bullets For The Newborn King," a sweet lament written from the viewpoint of a regretful assassin, but "You Hung The Moon" (a swoony ballad about a seance for an executed deserter) and "One Bell Ringing" (about Jean Charles de Menezes?) offer strangely dreamy interludes on a record which is preoccupied with lies and death.
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