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It's not pretty what's happened to rock's angry young man.
If Elvis Costello's music has become jagged-edged, challenging and often oblique chunks of song craft, so has his appearance changed.
His clean-shaven, big-glasses N.W.A. (Nerd With an Attitude) look, finally parodied on his Spike album as a grinning stuffed trophy labeled "The Beloved Entertainer," is no more.
Instead, here's a long-haired, scraggly-bearded, scowling man of 36, more resembling one of the granola-chomping rockers he so contrasted with when his first startling album came out in late 1977.
His music has long since stopped giving any concession to what's considered commercial pop — or even viable alternative rock — in the early '90s. So estranged from the modern recording scene, it's fitting he looks like a hermit, coming down from the mountain to deliver his latest opus. Mighty Like a Rose, which, like its predecessor, might at first be taken as another seething, obtuse, musically adventurous album.
He looks even weirder tooling around in a convertible in the model-infested video for "The Other Side of Summer," where he appears like a bizarre, Rumpelstiltskin gnome, informing the sun-drenched California youth of "the foaming breakers of the poisonous surf" and "the burning forests in the hills of Astroturf," to their utter obliviousness.
The cynicism, in full bloom on "The Other Side of Summer," slowly dissipates through the course of Mighty Like a Rose through a trio of sharply drawn relationship songs, down to a series of very personal songs to close the album.
Mighty Like a Rose was recorded with a deliberate predetermined sequence," Costello told a Creem magazine interviewer. "It's not a downbeat album, and I know that once you live with it for a while its particularly personal perspective will emerge."
What's more, he told the writer (who was mostly bent on knowing about the punk scene and when the Attractions will get back together) the new album "is more musically based and much less about meanings."
Indeed, what remains constant from his 1989 album, Spike, (his most successful commercial ventures in six years) is his love for musicianship. At the core of Rose are the superb players who accompanied him on tour the last time out.
The Rude 5, currently on Costello's "Come Back in a Million Years Tour" that stops at Lake Compounce Festival Park in Bristol Wednesday, includes such veterans as Jerry Scheff, the bassist who once played with that other Elvis; Larry Knechtel on keyboards; and modernist guitarist and Tom Waits sideman Marc Ribot. The only holdover from his long-running Attractions is drummer Pete Thomas.
It's a splendidly musical outfit, perfectly suited to Costello's challenging songs, which take on a spirited life in concert, where they tend to slyly shift to other songs that suggested them ("Pads, Paws and Claws" becomes "Leave My Kitten Alone" "Radio Sweetheart" becomes "Jackie Wilson Said") or veer off on hilarious musical asides ("Last Train to Clarksville" amid a reference to monkeys in "God's Comic").
The use of the Rude 5 for the basis of Rose gives the work a kind of cohesion that wasn't there on Spike, an album that initially jolted listeners by being all over the musical map.
Still, the new work veers mightily from dissonant rock "Hurry Down Doomsday (The Bugs Are Taking Over)" to the quiet balladry of "After the Fall" to the return of the Dirty Dozen Brass Band on a couple of tracks.
Mighty Like a Rose, named after a lyric in an obscure song by Count John McCormack and the Carols, also features the last remaining songs from Costello's much-celebrated collaboration with Paul McCartney, a joint songwriting venture that gave the ex-Beatle his closest recent brush with a hit two years ago in "My Brave Face."
Costello has been singing the McCartney/MacManus collaborative "So Like Candy" since the 1989 Spike tour. It only takes on more intensity here, even with such odd production details as backward drums.
It's just one of an array of weird studio effects, such as 14 separate keyboard tracks on "The Other Side of Summer" — from tack piano and toy piano to Vox Continental, calliope and Stereophonic Optigon — all playing exactly the same notes. Little of the extreme instrumentation detracts from the essence of the tracks, though, which are the songs.
Lyrically, he's elicited big question marks from reviewers in The New York Times, but Costello claims "the songs are self-evident and the least obscure and deeply personal I've ever written."
Certainly, he's rarely been as blunt as he is on the concluding couplet on the final track of the work, "Couldn't Call It Unexpected No. 4," in which the songwriter at the peak of his powers prays:
"Please don't let me fear anything I cannot explain
I can't believe I'll never believe in anything again.
Not to dwell too much on appearances, but the last time Costello sported a beard it was for another stellar album, King of America, that was such a departure from an earlier work, he even dismissed his made-up name, Elvis Costello, in favor of his own name, Declan Patrick Aloysius MacManus. The album itself was released under the umbrella name The Costello Show.
As he wrote in liner notes for the 1989 Girls Girls Girls compilation, "there was something reliable about the 10 years of in-jokes and eccentricities with the Attractions, so each session for King of America presented small, but crucial adjustments. Not only meeting and being at ease with new players almost every day, but also translating from 'English' into 'American.'"
Costello (having reverted to the moniker that has served him so well) continues his translating on his dense and uncompromising brand of pop music, through very musical exercises with top musicians. It makes for some rewarding performances from one of rock's best writers since Dylan.
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