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Be careful what you wish for, lest you get it. Over the past five years, many Elvis Costello fans have lamented his drift away from angry rock and into highbrow musicology, collaborating with everyone from pop songsmith Burt Bacharach to classical singer Anne Sofie von Otter.
For those who want Costello to rock again, the good news is he's rockin' again. The bad news is that When I Was Cruel (Island/Def Jam Music) is a good 35-minute record that goes on for more than an hour.
Perhaps because of wishful thinking, the party line on When I Was Cruel is that it's a return to Costello's form of 15 or 20 years ago, when this sort of high-volume vitriol was second nature to him. Now it feels like another genre exercise: "Elvis Costello in, Get Angry!" Costello's current vocal style goes heavy on quavering crescendos (a vestige of his Bacharach partnership on Painted From Memory), and the results sound closer to crankiness than anger.
When I Was Cruel is less memorable than 1994's underrated Brutal Youth, and it's not nearly as good as 1996's All This Useless Beauty (both of which were recently reissued in spiffy new expanded versions). Play all three albums back-to-back, and When I Was Cruel ranks a poor third.
The new album is clever. The opening track "45" invokes the end of World War II, the speed of an old vinyl single, the caliber of a handgun and the age of a midlife crisis in a dizzying display of wordplay. And the CD has its moments — the slippery grooves of "Spooky Girlfriend" and "Soul for Hire," the "Pump It Up" cops on "Tear Off Your Own Head (It's a Doll Revolution)," keyboard man Steve Nieve's work throughout.
But too much of it fails to linger in memory, even after repeated plays.
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