Elvis Costello: Extreme Honey: The Very Best Of The Warner Bros. Years

Elvis Costello's recordings for Warner Bros.—from 1989's Spike through last year's All This Useless Beauty—tend to be treated with unfair disparagement. Though certainly more uneven than the classic early albums, or even most of Costello's experimental mid-period material, there's not a bad disc among them. Spike had ambition and succeeded more than it failed; Mighty Like A Rose had at least a handful of great songs; The Juliet Letters (Costello's collaboration with a string quartet) sounded like nothing else, and produced some strong material in the process; and 1994's Attractions reunion Brutal Youth was just a fine, criminally overlooked piece of rock. That said, the albums don't really deserve a highlight disc all their own. Most are strong enough to stand up individually, but when cut and pasted together, they don't form a collection that's likely to win new fans. One listen to Get Happy, King Of America or My Aim Is True is usually enough to do that. In fact, the people most likely to be attracted to Extreme Honey will likely be those who picked up the albums the first time around, and the one new track (not counting an interesting X-Files soundtrack collaboration with Brian Eno), "The Bridge I Burned," is probably the most dispensable song Costello has ever produced. It's fitting, then, that it should appear on his most dispensable album.