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I suppose that part of the fun of owning and operating an Elvis Costello album involves putting on the headphones and fiddling with the treble controls in an effort to catch a snippet of his poorly enunciated, but fascinating, lyrics.
After spending a weekend with my ears twisted into the aural equivalent of a squint, I'd gladly forego such pleasures in the future if Costello would consent to print his lyrics on the inner sleeve. What makes the whole process doubly frustrating is the general obscurity of the Costello libretto, once assembled. After transcribing most of the lyrics in Trust, I'm still several steps removed from understanding all of its content.
Musically, it's probably the most pleasing and sophisticated album of Costello's career. Costello has expanded his horizons and moved beyond the Farfisa-organ-dominated sounds of Get Happy. Nick Lowe's production of Trust is full, without sounding flowery, and the vocals are less tinny, possibly because Lowe and Costello decided against trying to cram extra grooves on this disc (a noble effort which ultimately hurt Get Happy).
Costello has also allowed the acoustic piano to play an enormous role in his arrangements. The piano provides the salsa sounds of "Clubland" (somewhere between a mambo and a tango) and of "Lovers Walk" (an eerie, angry drum-dominated piece that recalls vividly Joni Mitchell's "Jungle Line"). It accents the melancholy country and western twang of "Different Finger" (a desultory, adulterous lament). Paired with Pete Thomas's raspy snare, the piano evokes the Motown sound on the Stonesian "From a Whisper to a Scream."
By far the most striking piano passages, however, are the hauntingly severe, almost Bach-like passages in "Shot With His Own Gun." Costello's deliberately haphazard method of crediting musicians of the record jacket makes it difficult to attribute all of this keyboarding to anyone, but I assume that Steve Nason (a.k.a. Steve Hart, Steve Naive, and Steve Nieve) is responsible for all or most of it.
Costello's new music is prettier and more accessible than ever — in direct contrast to the lyrics, which are more angry and abstruse.
Paranoia dominates the album, although it is not, in most cases, the intensely poignant, wounded sort of paranoia that informed, for example, "Girls Talk." Instead, the lyrics tend to reflect a general distrust of a mechanized, repressive, essentially predatory society, in which both the oppressing Establishment and the rebelling counter-culture are to be feared.
Writers like Thomas Pynchon and Thomas Berger have suggested to us, through their writings and their behavior, that the only way to sidestep society's manipulative influences is to conceal as much information as possible about oneself. Costello now seems, especially in hunted, haunting songs like "Watch Your Step," to be moving in a similar direction. I would not be surprised if, a year from now, he vanished from public view, lived in total reclusion and issued occasional albums from a hidden studio.
Further indications of that trend appear in several songs seemingly obsessed with the concept of one's "public image" (an area where Costello has gratuitously tarred and feathered himself in the past). In "New Lace Sleeves," Costello complains, "Good manners and bad breath get you nowhere / Even presidents have newspaper lovers / Ministers go crawling, under covers / She's no angel / He's no saint / They're all covered up / With whitewash and greasepaint." In "Fish 'n' Chip Paper" Costello attacks the people who exploit scandal sheets to establish themselves as celebrities: "If you've got something to hide / If you've got something to sell / If you've got somebody's bride / you might kiss and tell."
The world of nightclubs is portrayed as exceptionally dangerous in "Clubland," a song riddled with double entendres: "There's a piece in someone's pocket / To do the dirty work / They've come to shoot the pony / They've come to do the jerk."
Some of the songs are far less decipherable. "Shot With His Own Gun" might be the story of a suicide or of a murder, made to look like suicide. Similarly, the meaning of "Big Sister's Clothes" is unclear, although it suggests a young girl who has been turned into a high-priced prostitute — "She's got eyes like saucers / You think she's a dish / She is the blue chip that belongs to the big fish."
The album seems to affirm the fool-hardiness of "Trust" more than anything else. Costello is a strange, alienated, angry little man, but his music carries an unsettling element of truth. If he embodies many emotions we consider negative, he also helps us understand the degree to which those feelings are appropriate in the present circumstances.
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