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Elvis Costello’s The Boy Named If begins with no ifs or buts. A clanging guitar riff rings out like a siren, then his lead vocal kicks in. “Farewell, OK/You’ll be on your way,” Costello cries, firing up his new album with a brisk goodbye. It’s the musical equivalent of a rug being pulled from under our feet, a sudden plunge into a world of whip-smart tunes and riddling verses.
Costello likes dealing in opposites. The habit began early, a temperamental sign of young Declan MacManus’s mixed British Protestant-Irish Catholic family background. Reborn as Elvis Costello in the year zero of punk rock, he had a non-punk love for older musical forms, from 1970s pub-rock to the standards played by his father Ross MacManus, a big band musician.
Juxtapositions run through Costello’s musicianship, starting with the doubled perspective of his first hit, 1977’s “Watching the Detectives”. Beguiling melodicism goes with acidic lyricism. A taste for tidily constructed songs is combined with boundless musical wanderlust. Over the course of some three dozen studio albums, the 67-year-old has ranged over country, jazz, hip-hop, classical music and orchestral pop. He has been criticised for his eclecticism, but the itch remains unscratched. “What Is It That I Need That I Don’t Already Have?” asked a song on his last album of new material, 2020’s Hey Clockface.
The Boy Named If follows a customarily busy period of activity. Last year Costello released Spanish Model, a Spanish-language version of his 1978 album This Year’s Model, sung by guest vocalists; and a francophone EP called La Face de Pendule à Coucou, with turns from Isabelle Adjani and Iggy Pop. His 13 new songs are being released with a hardback book featuring 13 spin-off short stories with illustrations. The elaboration is typical — but the album itself is sharp and driven, a succinct return to the attacking style of his earlier days.
Joining Costello is his usual backing band, The Imposters. Steve Nieve’s keyboards skid and swirl through songs like dodgems, drummer Pete Thomas clatters his kit with gusto and bassist Davey Faragher provides the rhythmic glue. Costello sounds invigorated at the microphone, barking out lyrics with impressive vim.
“Farewell, OK” evokes an early Beatles song banged out with noisy energy in a Hamburg dive. “The Boy Named If” combines a stompy beat with neat melodic pivots. “Mistook Me for a Friend” blends a peppy Motown beat with 1960s organ licks and power-pop choruses. “The Man You Love To Hate” has the uproarious sound of a ska singalong in a bierkeller cabaret.
The songs are based around characters such as the footloose protagonist of “Penelope Halfpenny” and the romantic rogue portrayed in “Mr Crescent”. But The Boy Named If deploys a different style of storytelling from its near namesake, Johnny Cash’s “A Boy Named Sue”. Rather than Cash’s witty, twist-in-the-tale narrative, Costello’s songs have surreal scenarios and wordplay laced with vivid one-liners and ingenious rhyming couplets.
Stimulants lead to tearful predicaments in “Magnificent Hurt”; lies and threats run up debts in “Paint the Red Rose Blue”. Recurring themes — crime, music, cinema, sex, religion, colours, the stage — are scattered through the songs like the parts of a puzzle. The results are at once catchy and cryptic. These bustling, up-and-at-‘em songs have secrets.
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