Hey Clockface

The 14 tracks add up to a brilliant work full of confidence and ideas, all laid out on a massive canvas of invention and variety.

It shows Costello's mastery of mood and storytelling, the kind of skill he's acquired over the course of a long career, but the key to Hey Clockface is that these techniques are applied to a record that's as restless as anything Costello made in his younger days.

An album that's lighter on its feet than its closest relation, When I Was Cruel. Jagged but innovative and angry but wry. [Dec 2020, p.86]

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 typical Elvis Costello album, but then they never are. [Dec 2020, p.24]

Costello has always been an exceptional storyteller, and this is one of his most evocative albums.

Each of those sessions turns out to have a distinct sonic character. The Helsinki tracks have an urgent, constructed intensity about them. ... In contrast, the Paris songs, which make up the bulk of the record, have an organic immediacy that encompasses both the jazzy and the poppy. ... The two collaborative songs offer yet another change-up.

If this album has one major issue, though, it’s the sequencing. Because it jumps around stylistically from song to song, it feels jarring and takes many listens to fully sink in. That is fine, though, because at the end of the day, this is a record that fans will no doubt go back to years from now and rediscover. While not one of his very best albums, this is yet another fine addition to an incredible career.

The dueling approaches of the two recording sessions enrich each other, providing Hey Clockface with its yin and yang. Alone, either style might have seemed like predictable genre play for Costello at this stage in its career, but together, they make for an album that’s energetic and consistently surprising.

Here he is a complex man of dark humor and flashes of anger as he keeps fighting the good fight armed with a razor wit, an observer who has seen a world suffused with foible-filled humans, including himself.

It's sprawling, unpredictable, and always engaging. [Nov 2020, p.70]

As uneven as Hey Clockface can become, there are still enough reminders of Costello’s genius scattered across the album. After all these years, his aim is still mostly true.

It emits a level of depth that leaves you sometimes not really able to pinpoint what’s what, and other times feeling yourself being drawn in.

For most of this album, Costello switches between percussive anxiety and odd ditties with ease.

It might also be argued that Hey Clockface is Costello’s attempt to redefine himself as a more mature performer, one cognizant of the fact that he has an aging audience seeking subtlety and sentiment. Indeed, as the title suggests, time is ticking away, ensuring relevance becomes more a priority than rambunctiousness.

Periodically brilliant, if scattershot.