So why is Elvis Costello & The Attractions’ This Year’s Model on this best 1,000 albums ever thing?
In the recent best 1,000 albums ever piece on the fabulous Saturday Night Fever soundtrack (#253), I talked about how 1977 is a year when disco reigned for the masses while punk rock was also exploding.
And then there’s Elvis Costello, doing his timeless, soulful new wave thing. Costello has always been an artist who exists as his very own thing – his very own “lane,” so to speak – and for me, This Year’s Model (released in early 1978) is the very pinnacle.
But let’s take a step back for a moment… by fast forwarding to 1995.
During my senior year of college at Binghamton University, there were a small handful of movies that seemed to be on basic cable constantly. One of them was the Coen brothers’ screwball comedy, The Hudsucker Proxy, and another was a campus comedy called PCU.
To this day, I can quote a hundred lines from each, and the latter also featured a fun and eclectic soundtrack that includes not one but two Parliament Funkadelic tracks (my favorite of these is “Stomp,” which is used to great effect in the flick). And it also features a song called “Pump It Up.”
At the time, I was only vaguely aware of Elvis Costello – my musical education was pretty much in line with the good students of Port Chester University, in other words – but I really dug “Pump It Up,” and at some point figured out that the PCU version was a cover song performed by the great Mudhoney*.
* My wife and I saw Mudhoney perform at a tiny venue in San Francisco around 2000 or 2001 and they were fantastic.
Which is all to say that at some point I connected the dots between “Pump It Up” and Costello, and my path to Elvis Costello Enlightenment began in earnest.
What’s perhaps the wildest thing about Elvis Costello is how varied his sound is from song to song and album to album – and I’m super impressed with what the rock-leaning backing band The Attractions does for Costello’s music on This Year’s Model. There’s always a baseline of soulful new wave and rock going on, and then there’s also a striking timelessness to nearly all of his output as well.
And that’s not even getting to how smart and sharp Costello’s songwriting is. “This Year’s Girl,” perhaps the best song of all on the album, is both a catchy new wave track and also a compelling analysis of an increasingly disposable consumer culture.
Therefore, it was a genius move that the HBO drama The Deuce, created by the dynamite team of David Simon and George Pelecanos, chose “This Year’s Girl” to use for its theme song (with a new mix featuring vocals from Natalie Bergman) as the story moves to the emerging porn industry and the lives of cops, drug dealers, prostitutes, and porn performers and producers during the late 1970s in New York City.
This Year’s Model is really stacked end to end, and everything sounds dazzlingly fresh. For example, I’m always a sucker for the pulsing organ and energy of a song like “You Belong To Me.”
“Radio, Radio” closes the album and is an all-timer in my view. Costello’s voice and performance and energy is flat out phenomenal. I’m biased, of course, but I can’t imagine anyone listening to this one and saying, “Eh… no thanks, not my cup of tea.”
There’s no denying Elvis Costello. If you’re late to the party, no problem: hop right in right now.
Some stats & info about Elvis Costello & The Attractions’ – This Year’s Model
- What kind of musical stylings does this album represent? New Wave, Rock Music, British Bands
- Rolling Stone’s greatest 500 albums ranking – #121
- All Music’s rating – 5 out of 5 stars
- When was This Year’s Model released? 1978
- My ranking, the one you’re reading right now – #250 out of 1,000
Elvis Costello & The Attractions’ This Year’s Model on Spotify
A lyrical snippet from Elvis Costello & The Attractions’ This Year’s Model that’s evocative of the album in some way, maybe
See her picture in a thousand places ’cause she’s this year’s girl.
What does the “best 1,000 albums ever” mean and why are you doing this?
Yeah, I know it’s audacious, a little crazy (okay, maybe a lot cray cray), bordering on criminal nerdery.
But here’s what it’s NOT: a definitive list of the Greatest Albums of All-Time. This is 100% my own personal super biased, incredibly subjective review of what my top 1,000 albums are, ranked in painstaking order over the course of doing research for nearly a year, Rob from High Fidelity style. Find out more about why I embarked on a best 1,000 albums ever project.