MUSIC REVIEW OF THE DAY: ELVIS COSTELLO - IN MOTION PICTURES

Costello and his various music companies over the years have continually found different ways and formats to reissue his back catalogue, causing fans no end of pocketbook damage.  Just when you thought he'd run out of bonus tracks and rare things to slip onto deluxe versions, they come up with another trick.  This is a set of 15 tracks that have appeared in movies over his career, dating back to the late 70's.  Some are common, others pretty hard to find, and a couple could be showing up on CD for the first time, as far as I can tell.

Costello's been a favourite of film directors all through his career, probably because he's a literate rocker, and no doubt appealing to those artistic types already.  He's also been attracted to the idea over the years, and has written new material for several movies, as well as appeared in bit parts several times.  He's not proud either; he's done cameo roles as himself in everything from the Austin Powers series to The Spice Girls movie, and his acting roles usually see him as a comedic or strange character.  It's a holiday from albums and touring that he clearly enjoys, and he's brought some pretty good music to it over the years, and this celebrates it.

Many Costello-philes are collectors, and have sought out the soundtracks to these movies along the way, just to have the one new cut by their hero, so there's going to be a lot of repetition here for those folks, but still, there's a also going to be a couple even they don't have.  The rest of humanity, the normal part, will delight in finding a disc that includes such excellent numbers as My Mood Swings from The Big Lebowski, You Stole My Bell from The Family Man, or his cover of The Kinks classic Days, found in Until The End Of The World.  However, if you're any kind of Costello fan, you probably own Accidents Will Happen and Miracle Man, even if they did appear in E.T. and The Godfather Pt. III.  With several other rare movie songs from his career not included in this set, it seems odd to include them at the price of others.

My embarrassment at being one of those obsessive Costello collectors leads me now to admit I own several soundtracks simply because they included one of these songs.  But I have to have this set, because it has the track Oh Well, which I've not previously heard from Prison Song, and Sparkling Day, from One Day.  Both are good, and will no doubt serve well as bait for my fellow enthusiasts.  The rest of you should find plenty to enjoy here, an overview of a side career that has constantly yielded strong additions to the Costello canon, and now much more easily discovered here.