Elton John - Wonderful Crazy Night (Instrumentals) (2016)

On paper, Elton John‘s rollicking Wonderful Crazy Night sounds like it should have been a blockbuster. The album presents as an emotional bookend to 2013’s more meditative The Diving Board, and continues his later-period collaboration with producer T Bone Burnett that stretches back to 2010’s The Union with Leon Russell. Even the appearance of classic-era band members Davey Johnstone and Nigel Olsson, here for the first time since 2006’s retro-focused The Captain and the Kid, can’t completely save the uneven Wonderful Crazy Night. They help make “In the Name of You” into a swaggering outburst and give a Beatles-meets-Muscle Shoals feel to “A Good Heart,” only to get tangled up in the strangely maudlin “Claw Hammer” and the overly chirpy “Guilty Pleasure.”

TRACKLIST

01 Wonderful Crazy Night
02 In the Name of You
03 Claw Hammer
04 Blue Wonderful
05 I've Got 2 Wings
06 A Good Heart
07 Looking Up
08 Guilty Pleasure
09 Tambourine
10 The Open Chord