Rank the Records: This Year's Model

Let us now sing the praises of the Attractions. 

Three musicians, brought together by fate and newspaper advertisements, who arrived at just the right moment in the career of a young Elvis Costello to help him conquer pop music. Pete Thomas, the Empire State of Stick; Bruce Thomas, the Bass-line Maker; Steve Nieve, the King of the Keyboard Jungle. 

This Year’s Model marks the Attractions’ debut record as a band; their arrival defines the album, from the sound to the arrangements to the ferocity of the performances. My Aim Is True is an all-time great debut, but in some ways, Model acts as a reintroduction to EC. His musical relationship with the Attractions will come to define the next decade-plus of his music, and will continue to define his sound and image for decades after. 

This is a Big Deal. The Attractions are today considered one of the greatest rock bands ever to take the stage. This is their origin story. 

Ultimately, what the Attractions brought to EC’s music is the same thing they brought to the punk and new wave movement at large. They showed that raw instinctive musicianship could be applied with the same incisive anger that drove other contemporary bands to pick up guitars and grind out songs before they were even sure what chords they were playing. Three chords and the truth are all well and good, but it’s even better when you have a guy trained by the Royal Academy of Music to throw in the occasional seventh or relative minor. 

On Model, the Attractions are bound up inextricably in these songs. Part of what makes them such a great band is that they are always so instinctively sympathetic to Costello’s writing; whatever churn may happen as they work out songs in the studio, they are fully locked in once the final arrangement is in place. They’re there to serve the music. 

They even get a triumphant debut moment of sorts; on album opener “No Action,” after EC sneers “I don’t wanna kiss you/I don’t wanna touch,” the Attractions come thundering in like hounds from hell. It’s like you can hear all the tumblers clicking into place for Costello and the band, like they know exactly what’s happening and how it’s going to change everything. 

Model contains more than a few all-time classic songs, including the only Elvis Costello song that will get your mom’s toes tapping at a basketball game, “Pump It Up.” “(I Don’t Want To Go To) Chelsea” is another perennial, and a tune that may have only been made possible by the arrival of the Attractions. As skilled as the backing players were on My Aim Is True, it’s hard to imagine them delivering this level of sophisticated musical paranoia. The Thomases (no relation), Nieve and Costello tangle up their respective instrumental parts into a song where your ear is being drawn in four directions at once. 

It’s hard to even be critical of an album that is both so exceptional and so formative to a legendary career. Although Model and many of its songs are a sort-of foundational text to Elvis Costello’s entire body of work, there’s a relentlessness to the themes that in retrospect proves maybe its fatal flaw, especially in the context of thirty-odd other albums in his discography. This album, more than any other, has defined his artistic persona, at least as it’s understood to people who maybe own his Greatest Hits or don’t change the station when WXRT plays “Watching the Detectives.” 

As This Year’s Model approaches its midlife crisis, what catches the ear today are the moments when the record defies its own expectations. “Little Triggers,” a piano-led ballad where Costello’s surrender to obsessive love plays almost like romance. “Night Rally,” the first of many warnings from Costello’s pen that patriotism and fascism are flip sides of the same coin. “Chelsea,” where an unexpected dose of funk enters into the frame. 

When a band becomes legendary, their adventures enter into the mythology of rock. Bruce Springsteen and Clarence Clemons meet on a dark, stormy night when the door is literally blown off the tiny Jersey club where the Boss is playing. A chance encounter at a train station reunite Mick Jagger and Keith Richards over a shared love of blues records. 

There’s no grand mythology surrounding the arrival of the Attractions, and I don’t think they’ve ever aspired to enter the realm of legend. They’re more like soldiers of fortune in the same endless war who somehow ended up in the same bunker as a crazed, brilliant general, and decided to follow him into battle, come what may. This Year’s Model is their first glorious charge at the enemy. 

Stream This Year’s Model on the service of your choice.

Rank the Records is a recurring feature at That Fatal Mailing List, where we dig into one of Elvis Costello’s 32 studio albums (according to Wikipedia) and I provide a completely subjective opinion on how they rank against each other. What’s my favorite EC record? What’s my seventeenth-favorite EC record?! Find out as we…RANK THE RECORDS (TM).

6. My Aim Is True (1977)

11. This Year’s Model (1978)