About half the album features a band consisting of Costello (guitar), Steve Nieve (keyboards) and Pete Thomas (drums) with Nick Lowe (not a member of the Attractions) on bass. Costello himself plays bass on two tracks (2 and 8), and the complete Attractions line-up (Nieve, Pete Thomas and Bruce Thomas on bass) appears with Costello on tracks 3, 4, 6, 9 and 10.
Content
Costello began writing the material for Brutal Youth after writing a set of pop punk songs for Wendy James' 1993 album Now Ain't the Time for Your Tears. Under the working title Idiophone (named for an instrument "made of naturally sonorous material"),[15] Costello began recording these songs at Pathway Studios with former Attractions drummer Pete Thomas; he explained in a 1994 interview, "To be honest with you, I have to admit that I had decided to do this record all by myself. But then I had to face this reality: I'll never be a drummer. So I called Pete."[16] Ultimately, Costello found the minimalist sound at Pathway, where he recorded My Aim Is True, to be limiting, moving recording to Olympic Studios.
Upon arriving at Olympic, Costello recruited another ex-Attraction, keyboardist Steve Nieve, as well as former producer Nick Lowe on bass guitar. Though this arrangement, informally nicknamed "the Distractions",[17] performed on a significant portion of the album, Lowe bowed out on tracks that he felt required a more melodic and complex style of playing than he could provide.[15] At the urging of producer Mitchell Froom, who had been a fan of the Attractions, Costello recruited the final missing Attraction, Bruce Thomas, who had worked on other records with Froom at the time. Thomas and Costello had the most fraught relationship of all the former bandmates, making Costello initially hesitant to make the call:
The extension of using Mitchell was that he'd been working with Bruce Thomas, and it smoothed the process of getting back with him. I probably wouldn't have made that call if it had been down to me. But once we met up at a party at Pete Thomas's, we got along fine, and it seemed a natural thing to use him.
Nick has this great pretence that he can't play anything with more than five chords in it. I wouldn't say he's lazy about things, it's just that he prefers songs where he can get a groove figure that goes through all the chord changes. Bruce loves the challenge of trying to thread the same sort of line through a more complex set of changes. That's the difference in their approach. Some songs suited Nick, some Bruce, and in between I ended up playing bass on "Kinder Murder," and the bridge of "Just About Glad," just because the amateur approach seemed to be appropriate.[18]
Although only five songs on the album feature the full Attractions line-up, Brutal Youth was marketed as an Attractions reunion album, Costello sought to dispel notions that the album was a retro pastiche and that the reunion was a bid for commercial relevance. He commented, "It was a lazy way out — I think everybody at the company recognises that now. We were going through the beginnings of the recent upheaval, the corporate insanity at Warners, which affected everything at the company. It gave the troops of the company much less leeway to be creative. Therefore they grabbed hold of the one thing they saw as a saleable feature, which was, hey, the band is back, and they're rockin'! It's a bit of a simplification."[18]
Critical reception
Trouser Press wrote: "Throughout, deft instrumental touches, superb singing and the easy confidence of a still-competitive athlete returning to the scene of his greatest triumph make this another effortless win."[19] In The Village Voice's annual Pazz & Jop critics poll for the year's best albums, Brutal Youth finished at #31.[20]
