May 29, 2025

#238 The Best Album of 1989, Round 1 Match #4: Elvis Costello vs. Screaming Trees

Hey folks!

Today’s Best Album of 1989 match is:

#33 Elvis Costello, SPIKE

Listen on Spotify or YouTube  

vs.

#96 Screaming Trees, BUZZ FACTORY

Listen on YouTube 

To vote, follow this link to the Google Form. You will need a Google login to vote. If you can’t or won’t have one, let me know ASAP (either through this newsletter, my email [kentmbeeson@hey.com] or on the Best Album Brackets Bluesky account) and I’ll see what I can do.

We have one Designated Cheerleader today, it’s for SPIKE, and it’s from @bsglaser.bsky.social. Take it away, Brian!

A lot of people don’t like SPIKE, and I think there are 2 reasons why:

1. It’s Elvis Costello without the Attractions, and most people who like Elvis the C like him best with the Attractions. To be fair, most of his best records are with that band, but not all of them (see: MY AIM IS TRUE and KING OF AMERICA).

2. It opens with an off-putting song. “This Town” doesn’t land cleanly on the downbeats, has discordant sounds, and the lyrics are all over the place. As a mood setter, it’s a failure, and it doesn’t suggest good, non-Attractions-backed things ahead.

But if you start with track 2 and get that old band out of your head…SPIKE has lots of pleasures and cracking songs, played by some of the best in the biz.

“Let Him Dangle” is one of Elvis’ best story songs, condensing the complicated (and very real) story of Derek Bentley, who was executed for killing an English police officer in the 1950s. It’s tightly written and evocative, and Marc Ribot elevates the whole thing with his spiky leads. In fact, this is one of the secret upsides of SPIKE: some tunes, like this one, employ multiple Tom Waits sidemen, taking Elvis out of one comfort zone and dropping him into another. Elvis’ vocals are engaged and emotional, drawing you right into the story of Bentley’s untimely death.

And then there’s “Veronica,” which is EC’s biggest hit to date (chart-wise, at least). Co-written and co-played with Sir Paul, it’s jangly and melodic and hooky enough that it got a song about elder dementia onto the radio and MTV. Benmont Tench on keys, too! A tragic delight.

These are just 2 highlights in a field of many. “Chewing Gum” pairs the Dirty Dozen Brass band with Ribot, who spits out a solo that Les Claypool says is his favorite ever. “Tramp the Dirt Down” is as caustic an anti-Thatcher song as I’ve ever heard, with instrumentation that could have been sitting around at any pub’s last call. And “Deep Dark Truthful Mirror” pairs a heavy lyric with Allen Toussaint’s Big Easy piano.

The list goes on. Not all of the songs are A+, but as a whole SPIKE hits more often than it misses. It’s Elvis dusting off the old ways, thinking about the different roads he has to choose from, and then taking them all. He was never this all over the place before or since, and the variety hall approach is what makes SPIKE stick.

Thanks for all your work, Brian!

Click here to see the current results for the entire tournament, and click here to see the current results for the prediction bracket contest.

Yesterday, #97 The D.O.C., NO ONE CAN DO IT BETTER defeated #32 Throwing Muses, HUNKPAPA 99-83. For the first 8 hours or so, HUNKPAPA was leading by about 9-12 votes at any one time, but then something flipped, and NO ONE quickly caught up, and by the end, exceeded HUNKPAPA by about the same amount it was once down by. You just never know with these things.

Thanks for the exciting match!

Kent