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NEW YORK — Elvis Costello has established himself as about the most important figure in British new-wave rock although he's too oddly bookish-looking to be a punk; the image, instead, is of a computer salesman crossed with. Buddy Holly. And he is too fervently traditional in his adherence to rock basics to be an artsy new waver. He's an original, like all great rockers.
He's an original, like all great rockers.
He hasn't really yet broken through to a mass audience in this country, and the reasons for his success with new-wave fans and the hipper writers and FM programmers help explain his lack of massive success. Costello is hardly dulcet as a singer; his voice is harsh and husky, and for ballads especially (e.g., "Alison") the results could grate the ear. In addition, he has stuck severely to starkly simple, hard-edge arrangements, and he seemed to refuse to polish his music in any way that could be considered a sellout to blandness.
His songs are remarkable both lyrically and musically, and his personal passion went a long way toward making them work in concert. On record that same passion could sound hectoring, and his well-publicized anger about everyone and everything severely limited his appeal.
All of which makes his third and latest album, Armed Forces (released last week) all the more interesting. It was said that Nick Lowe, the producer, and Costello and his band spent a full month in the studio — short for your typical superstar, but downright finicky by Costello's previous standards. Word had leaked that he had changed the title from Emotional Fascism to the still-clever, but safer, Armed Forces.
Maybe Costello was capitulating to the star system and record-company pressure he had so virulently denounced, a suspicion reinforced by reports that he seemed to be carrying on a life-style not much less luxurious than that indulged in by those he had been denouncing just a few months before.
Well, on a first few hearings, Armed Forces is still more passionate than accessible. The songs are strong, lyrically, and Costello's voice is no more soothing than before. What's different are the arrangements, cleverer and more complex than ever before. Costello is really masterful at creating hook-filled settings that stick in the mind. Since his musical range is as wide and inventive as ever, this becomes a disc that anyone interested in where rock is going must hear.
And there's a bonus, too. In the first 200,000 copies, Columbia Records is including a 12-inch, three-song disc called Live at Hollywood High, which captures Costello in fine concert form. The disc is of special interest for two reasons. One, it contains a wonderfully intense version of his reggae song, "Watching the Detective," in which the band spits out this syncopated music with irresistible rhythmic alertness. And it also contains "Alison," and it was this performance that gave Linda Ronstadt, who was in the audience, her ideas about how she should phrase the song in her own version.
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