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Elvis Costello made his way into the disenfranchised hearts of vast numbers of Americans when, appearing on Saturday Night Live, he sang of seedy passion, derailed romance, and vengeance.
In "Watching the Detectives," to a girl disinterestedly watching a cop show:
"Detective, detective you belong to the parents / Who are ready-to-hear-the-worst about their daughter's disappearance / It takes a miracle to get me to stay / It only takes my little fingers to blow you away."
Costello's first album, My Aim Is True, sold well and was a sort of critics delight, a most intriguing piece of flotsam-jetsam of the new wave. This Year's Model continues in the same genre as Aim, namely that give and take of mental cruelty, the mundane, sometimes mechanical nature of relationships with pretty (and sometimes not so much so) young bourgeois females, who look like they've walked right out of Seventeen magazine. In his songs he is curt to the point of rudeness; in his impeachments of these hum-drum "models" — nevertheless bourgeois temper-goddesses — his snarlings sound like a personalized type of Gestaltian therapy, considering the emotional effluent of their nature.
Still, there is a morbid masochism in all this: his attacks are necessarily kamikaze:
"I don't want to be your lover, I just want to be your victim," and where the verbal shrapnel flies there is no cover, for anyone involved.
In Costello, there is a noble aspect of tragic acceptance in all this. He isn't deluded into prefab cultism or nihilism — he remains an adherent of a type of eternal recurrence, and as expressed in Aim, he's "still got a long way to go."
Both technically and musically This Year's Model is an improvement, yet retains the spontaneity and urgency of Aim.
Costello is a master of setting a mood, and conveying a mental state. Some of the instrumentals are simplistic to the point of self-denigration; the keyboard numbers appear reminiscent of Betty's (or is it Veronica's) work heard on the Archie cartoon.
Through this macabre, noir setting, the artist enunciates, carps, snarls and murmurs these pithy tragicomedies of an anti-hero with dark impulses and obscure desires:
"Sometimes I feel almost like a human being / Not just another mouth or lips."
But:
“Everybody is just goin' through the motions / Are you just goin' through the motions? / Lip service is all you'll ever get from me."
As an aside to all this, Costello's "Radio, Radio" is a snarling rebuke of radio's witless apathy, and record people:
"Some of my friends sit around in the evening and worry about the times they've had / Everybody else is overwhelmed by indifference and the promise of an early bed."
As in Aim, there's no weak spots in Model — from the murky "Lipstick Vogue" to the Dionysian "Pump it Up," Costello exhibits a skill and spontaneity in lyrics and music which is a welcome respite from radio, radio.
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