This Parade of Pleas

Elvis Costello’s 1984 album Goodbye, Cruel World has become a punchline for his fans…and even for EC himself, who had an unforgettable put-down in the opening of the liner notes for a reissue: “Congratulations! You’ve just purchased our worst album.”

It is a bad record, but it’s graced with a few great songs. “Sour Milk-Cow Blues” is not one of them. 

One of the biggest problems with Cruel World is that the sound of it seems to constantly stand between the singer, the songs, and the band. To my ears, it’s nothing at all like how 1983’s Punch the Clock sounded. They were produced by the same duo, Clive Langier and Alan Winstanely, who also gave us Madness’ “Our House” and They Might Be Giants’ “Birdhouse In Your Soul.” They create artificial pop in which each sound snaps together like a Lego house; they find transcendence in that precision. Here, it’s like someone slathered a handful of Vaseline over the mixing board.

Lyrically, “Sour Milk-Cow Blues” sounds like EC did a quick pass through his notebook and just stitched together every orphaned couplet he could find. It’s a vague kiss-off song to a former lover, with a loose attempt at a coffee/tea/sugar/milk theme in the first verse. “They took the girl of my dreams and left you here instead,” he sings, in the tune’s best one-liner. 

As we dig into the songs of Goodbye Cruel World, we’ll delve into some of the demo and alternate versions featured on both the Rykodisc and Rhino reissue sets. There’s a great EC album beneath the mess; listening to just the raw demos, it’s almost like a sad divorcee’s take on Springsteen’s Nebraska. Unfortunately, there’s no raw version of “Sour Milk-Cow Blues,” just the overburdened version on the album itself.