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Costello has yet to make a truly bad or boring album, but lately he has taken to making overly fussy ones. Mighty Like a Rose, his 15th record, is a densely produced, wildly diverse collection, dotted with tiny lyrical and sonic epiphanies and a few elegant melodies. The session musicians don`t rock as hard as Costello's Attractions once did, but he has produced great music before with hired guns (King of America). What's missing, on about half the cuts, is the emotional directness that informs Costello's best music. The slower tunes work best, such as the waltz-time "All Grown Up" and the exquisitely acidic, Leonard Cohen-like "After the Fall." But when other writers enter the mix — two collaborations left over from sessions with Paul McCartney and wife Cait O'Riordan's "Broken" — Mighty Like a Rose withers into mediocrity.
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