Critic's pick: Elvis Costello, 'National Ransom'

Few rockers of any generation keep an audience guessing as much as Elvis Costello. Fewer still make music full of enough stylistic and narrative cunning to make such guesswork worthwhile.

Costello's new album, National Ransom, borrows, in part, from the Americana strains of last year's Secret, Profane and Sugarcane. You hear echoes of that record through the hard country yarn That's Not the Part of Him You're Leaving. But one could just as easily consider the album Costello's return to post-punk form with the cheesy guitar-organ charge of National Ransom's title tune.

But National Ransom is more than any of that. It's a vastly restless album with a jubilant lyricism often masking a dark consciousness. Deceit and death are rampant in these songs. Still, Costello offers another literate bag of story lines to illuminate the myriad sounds.

You Hung the Moon, for instance, comes enveloped with warm strings and is sung by Costello as a lullaby. But the lyrics reveal a ghost story: the saga of a World War I soldier who was hung as a deserter. Suddenly, Costello's straight-faced crooning, not to mention the song's devious story line ("You hung the moon, from a gallows in the sky; choked out the light in his lunar blue eye") seem profoundly sad.

The sparse, acoustic Bullets for the New Born King, exudes a similar, emotive grace. But the story is even more intensely grim as it outlines the remorseful confessions of a gunman for hire ("Oh my eyes were stinging after our assassin's work was done").

The rockers, oddly enough, lighten the mood. The Spell That You Cast is one of Costello's most delicious pop creations in years. The tune sets his Attractions sound of old (jagged guitars and cheesy organ runs) to the country swagger of his recent Sugarcanes band. Topping it all off is a guitar hook that sounds as if it were shot out right of the hands of the Quadrophenia-era Who.

And then there is the guest list — the guitar jolt by Marc Ribot on the title tune, the alternately earthy/otherworldly mix of violin and lap steel guitar by Stuart Duncan and Jerry Douglas during Stations of the Cross, the fascinating guitar clatter on Dr. Watson I Presume by Ribot and Buddy Miller, and the jubilant piano stroll on My Lovely Jezebel by Leon Russell that further fuels the latter's remarkable career renaissance this fall.

But Costello remains ever the ringmaster here, stitching pieces of Americana inspirations together with epic, though often tragic, narratives into another fascinating lot of rock, pop and folk reveries. He is, in short, as crafty as ever here.

This story was originally published November 1, 2010 at 12:57 PM with the headline "Critic's pick: Elvis Costello, 'National Ransom'."