From "SPIN Alternative Record Guide", Vintage, 1995 Album ratings (on a scale of 1-10; an * indicates the album is on the book's top 100): My Aim is True - 9 This Years Model - 10 Armed Forces - 9 * Get Happy!! - 8 Taking Liberties - 7 Ten Bloody Marys & Ten How's Your Fathers - 7 Trust - 8 Almost Blue - 5 Imperial Bedroom - 9 Punch the Clock - 4 Goodbye Cruel World - 3 The Best of Elvis Costello and the Attractions - 7 King of America - 8 Blood & Chocolate - 7 Out of Our Idiot - 6 Girls Girls Girls - 8 Spike - 3 G.B.H. - 2 Mighty Like a Rose - 3 2 1/2 Years - 10 The Juliet Letters - 2 Brutal Youth - 4 The Very Best of ... Elvis Costello and the Attractions 1977-1986 - 9 Elvis Costello is cursed by being almost too smart. This at once makes for elegant, extravagant ironies in his best work--most arrestingly, the homages to '60s rock and folk in his first two alleged punk albums--and glaring, pinched intellectualisms in his worst. No serious student of the music will deny him a place in the music's handful of most talented and potent performer- artistes; yet in this pantheon he will always be the least full-bodied, least influential, and perhaps most disrespected. Considered the height of new wave on its release, MAIT is really folk rock, from the rumbling instrumentation of "Miracle Man" to the Byrdsian "(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes," a conceit that masks a self-conscious anger: "If they knew what I think/They'd bury me alive," Costello yelps proudly. "Watching the Detectives" captures well his unmatched sardonicism. A panting suitor's date is absorbed in a TV murder mystery; the male's impotent rage and the woman's blithe vacuousness ("she's filing her nails as they're dragging the lake") are limned with economy and venom. The second album began a collaboration with the Attractions, comprising drummer Pete Thomas, bassist Bruce Thomas and organist Steve Nieve. TYM is among other things a potent dance album and a semiotic encoding of much classic '60s rock, particularly pre-"Beggar's Banquet" Stones. Arranged with dramatic flair (the openings and background vocals of "No Action" and "Hand in Hand," for example) and densely punctuated with peeved-to-vengeful wordplay, the songs attack the mass media ("Radio Radio"), its stars ("This Year's Girl"), England's flirtation with fascism ("Night Rally"), and of course anything having to do with love ("You Belong to Me"). MAIT is arguably a folk album, TYM unquestionably rock. AF is a deeply subverted pop exposition on a global scale, from third-world mercenaries in South Africa ("Oliver's Army") to the paranoia induced by the glowing box in your living room ("Who put these fingerprints on my imagination?"). Costello plainly appreciates this heated period of creativity, which indeed rivals that of mid-'60s Beatles or Bob Dylan--2 1/2 Years is so titled to make the point plain. The four-CD set includes the first three albums and a bonus disc, "Live at El Mocambo", originally a widely bootlegged 1978 CBS promotional album, which captures well the band's disheveled onslaught of the time. GH!! is a densely-packed mix of R&B and the chemicals that fueled the band's creativity. As a consequence it defies any sort of rational analysis and nonetheless teems with sicko confections, including a plain cry for pop help ("High Fidelity") and an interesting take on love as civil disturbance ("Riot Act"). "Trust" is pretty high-level product by the preeminent song- writer of the day, nothing more. AB is a brilliantly conceived amalgam of mostly country covers that is respectful but hardly listenable nearly 15 years on. Costello revived his reputation by ditching producer Nick Lowe and taking up with Geoff Emerick, who'd helped engineer many Beatles and Chris Bell classics. The result was IB, an impenetrable, ultra-sophisticated pop song cycle, as cunningly created as anything in his oeuvre and hence in rock- 'n'-roll. The album's supreme tension comes from the clinicle dispassion with which Costello views everything from parent-child relationships to international diplomacy--a dispassion that is thoroughly undermined by the extravagant, sometimes hysterical arrangements. The follow-ups, GCW and PTC, find Costello drifting. The minor hits from both ("The Only Flame in Town," "Everyday I Write the Book") and GCW in its entirety are now disowned by their maker. (On "Worthless Thing" he is reduced to sniping at rock fans who buy other people's records.) He fought against this decline with a one-two punch in 1986. KOA is a ragged, acoustic-based work created with the help of T-Bone Burnett and a host of special guests, among them the other Elvis's TCB band. There's too much rockabilly filler but also a suite of softer songs--"King of America," "Indoor Fireworks," "American Without Tears," "Suit of Lights"--whose grace and delivery put into context the junk and even the moments of self-pity. Then came a full-throated Attractions album, B&C, welcome at the time, but now less dear; what's left are a couple of pop gems ("Blue Chair," "Crimes of Paris") and too much over-emoting. The Rykodisc reissues of the Columbia years, complete with the original British packaging, sparkling annotations by Costello, and an extremely generous allotment of contemporaneous non-album material, are models of the form; bravos all around. (Though completists should note that there are still released but uncollected B-sides out there.) The original 1985 best-of has been supplanted several ways in both England and the U.S. Over here, there is a solid new Rykodisc set, as well as competing Columbia two- CD and -cassette collections both known as GGG but each differing from the other by about a dozen songs. Take your pick. All of the tracks from TL and its British counterpart, TBM&THYF, now appear on the Rykodisc reissues. OOOI is a U.K.-only collection of '80s non-album material, most but not all of which is on the Rykodisc CDs. Late-period, post-Columbia Costello is as yet undistinguished. "G.B.H." is the soundtrack to a BBC TV series, chock full of snoozy instrumentals. A few collaborations with one Paul McCartney and a host of outre session people (from avant-guitarist Marc Ribot to the Dirty Dozen Brass Band) mark "Spike", to no avail. On this and the similarly unessential MLAR Costello sounds cranky and out of touch with his muse, potentially permanently. Slightly desperate, Costello teamed up with the Brodsky Quartet for a monstrous epistolary song cycle called TJL. For BY he reconvened, pathetic- aly, with the Attractions. The album and accompanying tour show Costello doing what he now does best: playing overly mannered nostalgia songs bereft of immediacy or vision--in a phrase, old new wave for the VH-1 set. --written by Bill Wyman, staff writer for the "Chicago Reader"