Review of Brutal Youth
Q,1994-04-01
Issue #91
- Stuart Maconie
4 stars

 

REASSURING

Elvis Costello: he's snapped, he's crackled and now he's gone pop.

ELVIS COSTELLO
Brutal Youth

WARNERS 962455352

 

A performer as singular as Elvis Costello invites any number of critical perspectives and, needless to say, few gain his approval. Still, here's one. Through the late '70s and early '80s, Costello was the nonpareil among British songwriters with waspish, witty and memorable songs. Then circa Goodbye Cruel World, the muse deserts him, or rather, he dumps her in a fit of lunacy and spends the rest of the decade making bad fashion decisions and increasingly refractory and charmless albums. Plausible? Then welcome Costello's best pop album since 1982.

Brutal Youth reunites Costello with The Attractions for the first time since Blood And Chocolate and their importance can't be overstated. It's reassuring and thrilling to hear that sound again: the defiantly primitive clatter and boom of Pete Thomas's drums, Steve Nieve's baroque keyboard cameos and Bruce Thomas wandering in the upper reaches of the fretboard. And there's Costello's voice, moving from a strangulated rasp to a purr.

He hasn't skipped styles so smoothly and successfully since Imperial Bedroom. These 15 songs are a kaleidoscope of moods: disgust at the human detritus around him, hamstrunq lust, raised eyebrows of appalled glee at our foibles. Whereas recent albums carried the whiff of sanctimony and posturing, Brutal Youth resembles a classy refinement of what he did for Wendy James on her last album - short, to the point and always tart and effective.

Pony Street, 13 Steps Lead Down and Kinder Murder combine bristling energy with accessibility in a way not heard since You Little Fool and its ilk. Similarly, it's a long time since Costello handled sarcasm as winningly as on the luridly pretty This Is Hell, where he shrinks from the banalities of life ("My Favourite Things is playing again and again/But it's by Julie Andrews and not by John Coltrane"). Costello has long coveted the Smokey Robinson style lyrical conceit and two of his best are here - the haunting fragment Still Too Soon To Know and Just About Glad where he mock laments a love affair that never quite ignited ("And though the passion still flutters and flickers/It never got into our knickers/If I'm the greatest lover that you never had/I'm just about glad").

20% Amnesia and My Science Fiction Twin lack shape but they are atypical. Better to concentrate on London's Brilliant Parade, You Tripped At Every Step and the mysterious closer The Favourite Hour which further confirm a) that Costello is back in the ring and b) a shave is nearly always a prerequisite for good pop music.* * * *

Stuart Maconie