Review of Brutal Youth
New Musical Express, 1994-03-05
- David Quantick
ELVIS COSTELLO
Brutal Youth (WEA/All formats)
IT BEGINS with a piano flourish, crashes like the world falling over
into a riff riot of guitars and drums, a man starts shouting at you in the voice of Buddy
Holly trapped in the larynx of a crow and using phrases like "cartoon
threat" and "Das Kapital" in anger, and then it all careens
on in a similar fashion for an hour or so through 15 mad, enraged, comical and loud songs,
until it expires in a thoughtful heap of piano again.
Good Lord! This must be an Elvis Costello And The Attractions
album! And it is; 'Brutal Youth' once more sees the King of Glasses and Rage going through
his traditional seven-year cycle of kicking aside all thoughts of musical eclecticism,
grace and session musicianliness in favour of working with Pop's Roughest Men on a new
kind of terror weapon. The results, unsurprisingly, are striking in the extreme.
There's the usual name-that-hookarama of references, this time
taken largely from the Costello/Attractions back catalogue - a keyboard snatch from 'Radio
Radio' here, a distorted assault on the 'Pump It Up' riff there - there's the welcome
assault on human unkindness, soldiers get it in the neck, sentences like "the
failed Don Juan in the big bow-tie is very sorry that he spoke" (it's like Bob
Dylan happened) abound and all the songs achieve the minor miracle of sounding like
they're all two minutes long even though they're not. Brutal? Yes indeed.
Youth? Not, naturally. Elvis Costello trashed New Wave as an idea
hundreds of years before Elastica went skinny tie-shopping, and he can do that thumping
syncopation in your sleep, never mind his own. Unlike his contemporaries and anyone else
who's been called a singer-songwriter, Costello isn't averse to coming back to the
amphetamined adolescent rock of his past; but unlike the callow young artistes of now, he
brings to that noise something very close to maturity and wisdom.
Angry and jealous he may still be, but Elvis is a grown-up, and a
very big one, too. Songs like the beautiful and paced 'Still Too Soon To Know' and the
panoramic 'London's Brilliant Parade' (a song which manages to both refer to Costello's
rock past and express sympathy for the lions and tigers in Regent's Park Zoo) are no
teenage whine but the work of the adult entertainer. Elvis is a man who's lived and loved,
ladies and gentlemen, and what's more, he's not afraid to say "knickers". (He
says "knickers" in two songs, trainspotters will be pleased to know.) Even after
six or so playings, 'Brutal Youth' still crashes by like a carnival procession with no
brakes. 'Kinder Murder', '20% Amnesia', '13 Steps Lead Down' - these songs come at you
flailing like bare-knuckle fighters blinded by their own blood. There are, admittedly,
quieter moments - the whimsical 'This Is Hell', the final track 'Favourite Hour' - but
these are the tiniest breaks in this furious storm of garage mad-bloke rock.
And thank God, say I. A significant thing about 'Brutal Youth' is
that, while like its predecessors it clocks in at the traditional 15-songs-in-one-hour
Costello time, it sounds about ten minutes long. You come into 'Brutal Youth' young and
full of plans: a few seconds seem to pass, it ends, and you find that your children have
grown up and are all flying to Mars in rockets. The same could not be said of 'Spike',
'Mighty Like A Rose' and 'The Juliet Letters'; the three albums before 'Brutal Youth' were
increasingly, ah, complex things; and while 'The Juliet Letters' is surely excellent and
'Spike' end even 'Mighty Like A Rose' contain moments of brilliance and beauty, over the
past five years, we must as happy pop listeners concede that listening to these albums
sometimes creates the feeling of a slow march through molasses.
'Brutal Youth' is a throat-clearing, snot-spitting spring clean
that benefits us as well as the Elv. (And there are signs that things might have been
otherwise; observe the extra tracks on the 'Sulky Girl' single, one a percussive
instrumental called 'Idiophone' - at one point the projected title of this or a similar
album - and 'A Drunken Man's Praise Of Sobriety', an excessively Tom Waitsian reading of a
Yeats poem. We wuz spared, readers, we wuz spared.)
But enough of that; 47 albums down the line, reunited (doubtless
briefly) with a band he hasn't worked with since 1964, best mates with everyone who's ever
won a Brit award or given their child a novelty Christian name, Elvis Costello has made an
album that sounds like a debut with all the fire and fury that entails - and he has
brought to it a wise man's brain and wit. Yes, readers - there is a place for the informed
craftsman-like singing songwriter in our lives; and with 'Brutal Youth', Elvis Costello
has kicked down your door and murdered your dog to make that place. (9)
David Quantick