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Like Frankenstein's creation breaking his chains, bursting through the massive laboratory doors and crashing the good burghers' traditional spring carnival, a surge of new recording artists — monstrous or otherwise, depending on your viewpoint — has made its presence most conspicuously known on record shelves in the past few weeks.
The rock critics establishment, which grows uneasy when music comes along for which there is no category, has labeled this surge the New Wave.
From the number of recent releases, it would appear that the wave has yet to crest.
The pioneers of New Wave like the Sex Pistols, Talking Heads and Television, have become virtual elder statesmen of the movement.
Even the current acknowledged style setter, Elvis Costello, is only one of dozens of New Wave bands with albums just released or about to be.
For those of us who are not ripe for revolution, the music requires something of an act of will to appreciate.
I did not like any of it when I first heard it a few months ago. Since then, some of it has grown on me. Either it's getting better or I'm getting new gear ratios ground out in my value judgment machinery.
The best among the new releases Is Elvis Costello's This Year's Model (Columbia Records).
Of all the New Wavers, whether self-styled or cubby-holed as such, he seems to have gone the farthest toward a really new definition of rock music.
Far from the pretentious posturing of people like Richard Hell, whose squalling are equivalent to an amplified temper tantrum, Costello's work here and on his earlier recordings reveals both intelligence and skill, along with considerable courage.
His stuff rocks hard, but it sounds lean and hungry. He apparently cultivates the appearance of an innocuous little "nerd," with his jacket and tie, his choppy, short hair and his big innocent eyes behind professorial glasses.
That's where the courage, or a quality akin to it, comes in. Costello is doing something new here. He is consciously stripping away from himself every bit of both the boundless allure and the unfortunate pomposity that attended rock stars in today's image-soaked world.
Like Frankenstein's creature — to use a rather far-fetched analogy — who, if you'll remember, did have something to communicate to the townspeople, he's forcing us to accept him on his own very stringent terms (or, of course, to reject him entirely).
And in letting him reach us, communicate with us in that desperately sincere, single-minded way of his, we sense a new way of looking at things.
Costello's skill lies in his ability to use rock's own power to turn its traditional image inside out like this.
In cuts like "No Action" and "Pump It Up" on his new album, we're treated to beck-to-back basics guitar work and driving rhythms, but the lyrics — and even the music, on a visceral level — are in tune with something else again. Hear them.
Costello can also be heard on an excellent collection of British New Wave groups recorded live during an English college concert series. He does an absolutely chilling, one-of-a-kind version of the Burt Bacharach pop standard, "I Just Don't Know What to Do With Myself," which takes on whole new depths of meaning in his treatment.
The album, Stiffs Live, serves as a sampler for American listeners of the talent on Stiff Records, an import label distributed here by Arista Records.
Also worth your while from the sampler is Ian Dury, whose "Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll" says all that needs to be said about what he's saying.
Dury's own album on Stiff, New Boots and Panties, unfortunately, doesn't measure up to his concert performance here.
Then there's Nick Lowe, also on the sampler, who has just come out with Pure Pop For Now People (Columbia Records), which is absolutely subversive and a lot of fun.
Another New Wave release of great promise is the new self-titled album by Tuff Darts (Warner Bros. Records). That's in spite of the lead singer's name — Tommy Frenzy.
They make up for that with song titles like "My Guitar Lies Bleeding In My Arms" and "Your Love Is Like Nuclear Waste." The music and lyrics are equally inventive.
An album you will not enjoy is the new self-titled release by Wire (Capitol Records). Just a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Costello and Lowe, by the way, will be at Kleinhans Music Hall on April 25.
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