Consider "Oliver's Army," the piece de resistance on Elvis
Costello's Armed Forces, an album that's killer in several senses of the
word. The tune sounds bright and bouncy, with a jangly keyboard riff along
the lines of "Here comes Santa Claus," and it's enough to make you want to
rock around the room. But sit down, Fred, and get a load of the lyrics
you're dancing to:

There was a checkpoint Charlie (etc.)

        In fact, this is an angry song about imperialism and the military,
reportedly written just after Costello visited Northern Ireland. In spirit
and on its very congenial surface "OA" is a hit single. You can hear it one
way, or the other, or both. Elvis Costello doesn't seem to give a damn what
you do, and that's no small part of his charm.
Costello writes songs that are elusive at times, bursting with bright
phrases that you can't always catch (As someone who still thinks the Rolling
Stones are singing "Heartbreaker with your bowling ball," I'm all in favour
of half-audible lyrics that encourage a valuable do-it-yourselfism in the
listener.) He sings about violence with a vibrant romanticism, and about
love with murder in his heart. He writes short, blunt compositions that
don't pretend to be artful, though they are, and don't demand to be taken
seriously, even though they they're more stunning and substantial than
anything rock has produced in a good long while. He doubles himself back at
every turn, and you're forced to take it or leave it.
        There's only one way to listen to Elvis Costello's music: his way.
The songs are so brief that they barrel right by, leaving an impression of
jubilant and spiteful energies at war with each other. Every now and then,
words like "quisling" or "concertina" leap out of nowhere to add to the
confusion. Images are etched hard and fast, then replaced by new ones even
stronger. There's an overload of cleverness on the LP- more smartly turned
phrases that twelve songs could ordinarily bear. But the rapid pacing
alleviates any hint of self-congratulation.
        Costello's song are dense in the way Bob Dylan's used to be, driven
by the singer's faith that if this line doesn't get you, the next one will,
and compressed so tightly that they lend themselves to endless rediscovery.
He has something like the young Dylan's rashness, too, being hotheaded
enough to oversimplify anything for the sake of a good line, and being a
good enough writer to get away with it. His puns are so outrageous they're
irresistible. In "Senior Service" (the name of an English cigarette): "It's
the breath you took too late / It's the death that's worth than fate." In
"Oliver's Army": "Have you got yourself an occupation?". In "Chemistry
Class":  "Are you ready for the final solution?" The first line on the
record: "oh. I just don't where to begin."
        Beneath all this gamesmanship lurks something like a grand passion,
however unexpected it may be from a fellow that favours photographs that
make him look like a praying mantis. The EP that accompanies some copies of
Armed Forces (Columbia wants you to buy the album in a hurry, so they'll
stop including Live at Hollywood High after the first several hundred
thousand records) contains a live version of "Alison" that's so steeped in
tortured love it makes the concert audience squeal. And the LP's final cut,
"(What's So Funny 'bout) Peace, Love and Understanding" is delivered with
sincerity bordering on desperation. The wise guy who can work Hitler into a
song about competitive friendship ("Two little Hitler's will fight it out
until / One little Hitler does the other one's will) is also prey to
authentic romantic agonies so exquisitely maddening they go hand in hand
with danger.
Listen to "Watching the Detectives" rerecorded in an almost playful version
on the EP, or "Party Girl", with its alternating waves of passionate
declaration and angry denial. No Elvis Costello love song is without its axe
to grind or its hatchet to bury, but at least the emotion, however
strangled, comes through. Costello never sounds exactly willing to give
himself over to sentiment, yet he works hard to make himself more than
marginally accessible: a gangster with heart. Without that bit of
humanising, he'd be a specialty item. With it, he can be a star.
It hardly hurts that Costello's songs are never less than snappy, even when
the drum parts are reminiscent of machine guns, or that Nick Lowe has
produced him this time with a large and general audience in mind.
Notwithstanding his Buddy Holly glasses and hid Buddy Holly white socks,
Elvis Costello refers most readily to the sixties. And Lowe makes the most
of this, filling AF with recycled lounge music ("Moods for Moderns"),
Beatles-like codas and the trashiest organ lines this side of "96 Tears."
Like the lyrics, these echoes run together in a quick, exciting jumble, so
dense that the end of one number, "Busy Bodies," can mix the phrasing of
John Lennon and Paul McCartney's "Nowhere Man" with the guitar line of Roy
Orbison's "Oh, Pretty Woman" and the whoo-oos of the Beach Boys' "Surfer
Girl." Costello draws so heavily on the recent rock past that his reliance
upon it amounts to a kind of cheapening, a repudiation. But that's only one
more in a long line of quicksilver contradictions.
	Right now, Elvis Costello serves as a feisty and furious middleman, halfway
between rock's smoothest sellouts and the angriest fringes of its New Wave.
He wants to be daring, but he also wants to dance. He'd like to seethe and
sell records at the same time. He's mindful of- indeed insistent upon- the
form and its limitations: it's only rock and roll, after all. But he takes
it to the limit all the same.


Written by Janet Maslin.