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Rock critics used to like to call Elvis Costello the Cole Porter of their generation, which was their way of saying (a) we really like his melodies and we like his clever little wordplay even more, and (b) we know you hate everything else we young people listen to and we know Iggy Pop and Joey Ramone are no Gershwin or Berlin, but now, finally, we have one of our own that measures up, so please acknowledge this and help us validate our existence.
Immediately, of course, Costello, an angry and clever young man who used to write viciously brilliant pop songs, tacitly acknowledged this himself by recording several "mature" albums. People who didn't much like rock may very well have liked Spike (on which Costello collaborated with fellow Irving Berlinesque Paul McCartney) or Mighty Like a Rose, to take the two most recent examples, but people who loved rock would have been best off selling them back to the record store for a couple dollars' worth of credit, with which they could have bought, say, a Tom Waits record.
And now Costello has really gone off the deep end.
The Juliet Letters (Warner Bros. 45180) is billed as "a song sequence for string quartet and voice." It represents a collaboration between Costello and a British string quartet, the Brodsky Quartet. It would appear to be the most pretentious thing he has ever done. Except that it is also one of the best, or at least one of the best in many, many years.
Besides the thrill of hearing a good voice — and suggesting his is in fact a great one wouldn't cause a quibble here — sing pop songs to chamber arrangements that include no traditional pop or rock instruments, The Juliet Letters, for all the pretense the concept may imply, also represents a major pop songwriter giving up a bit of control just when he needed to. The album is a true collaboration: Though Costello accepts an unequal share of the credit, he and the four Brodskyites all wrote words here and music there for the album's 20 songs.
Beyond pretension, Costello's problem on recent albums, both lyrically and musically, was one of boredom. His songs, for all his serious ambitions, ambled without getting anywhere. The Juliet Letters gives him lyrical structure by way of a simple concept. All the songs are imagined letters: a chain letter, a suicide note, love letters and various missives between estranged family members.
Costello, who was often accused of misogyny early in his career, writes or sings several of them in women's voices. And they are voices as funny, mean and vengeful as his best men of the past.
In "For Other Eyes" a woman investigates her husband's philandering and finds something worth laughing about on a piece of paper in his wallet: "I dialed again, I could not resist," Costello sings, "revealing just the dentist receptionist." An eccentric aunt, in "I Almost Had a Weakness," mentions to a begging nephew that she tossed his family snapshots in the fire. "God they were ugly children," she writes to him.
After the chamber-music instrumental that begins the album, much of the music sounds like the stuff of musical theater. "This Offer Is Unrepeatable," the chain-letter song, could almost have come out of Gilbert and Sullivan. It has a tightness of structure that has been missing from much recent Costello, and just plain better melodies than he's been up to lately.
The best come, as often as not, from the quartet, not the singer. "Taking My Life in Your Hands," with music credited to Costello and cellist Jacqueline Thomas, has a pop-ballad melody that will take you back to the early '60s and the Brill Building. "I Almost Had a Weakness," by violinist. Michael Thomas with "tango passages" added by Costello, could be a Broadway showstopper. Up against his other recent work, it will no doubt be a Costello showstopper.
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