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Armed Forces Elvis Costello's third album, is his most mature and well produced work to date. A stunning tour-de-force of studio technique and musical style, the album is a powerful testament to the breadth and diversity of Costello's rock and roll prowess.
With his maturity comes an increased sophistication, both in recording and songwriting. Gone is the gawky adolescent anger Of the My Aim is True persona. A line like "You're upstairs with the boyfriend / While I'm left here to listen" from "I'm Not Angry " seems rather petty and insignificant now when viewed alongside the larger concerns of Armed Forces. The same sneering anger seethes just beneath the surface, but in a world of armed forces the stakes are much higher: life and death.
Elvis Costello sees the world in terms of power. Just as it is possible to judge history or politics as a succession of power struggles, Costello brings such struggles to bear upon interpersonal relations. The potency of his metaphoric language springs from a seeming determination to take everything personally. Call it paranoia, but it makes for great lyrics:
"Two little Hitlers will fight it out until,
One little Hitler does the other one's will
is from the song "Two Little Hitlers," about partners in a love-hate relationship.
The language of the military and of passion is identical: no translation necessary. This has been a strain running through Costello's work in the past. From "The Beat," "I Don't wanna be your lover / I just Wanna he past." From "The Beat": "I don't, wanna be your lover / I just wanna be becomes an obsession. Another illustration, from "Busy Bodies," a song about the deficiency of sex: "You check her outline / Break your regulations." This passage also illustrates Costello's remarkable faculty for taking an everyday cliche and rearranging it slightly to give it a new and surprising significance. "I got hit looking for a miss" from "Moods for Moderns" and "They keep you hanging on til you're well hung" from "Accidents Will Happen" are but a few examples.
The song which perhaps best illustrates Costello's verbal acrobatics, "Chemistry Class," is a series of these puns, all relating to chemistry. ("You're ready to experiment, ready to get burned"). And returning to the military theme of this album, the chorus asks, "Are you ready for the final solution?" In light of this kind of wordplay, even a phrase like "You want her attention" takes on a new meaning and a greater resonance.
The modern world twist
This "cliche with a twist" method is —. tied closely to Costello's method of musical composition. This is to say that much of the rock and roll on this album is derivative, in the positive sense. The most obvious reference point here is the music of the Beatles. "Accidents Will Happen," for example, has a melodic line as beautiful and hummable as any that Paul McCartney ever wrote. This and several of the tunes have distinctly Beatlesque constructions with abrupt yet perfectly logical sounding shifts to the minor, ghostly overdubs of vocal harmony and extended, contrasting coda sections. Costello's debt to The Beatles becomes clearest when, at the end of "Party Girl" a purposeful reference is made to "You Never Give Me Your Money." The sources of the music are as wide as Costello's imagination, however. If the guitar riff on "Busy Bodies," for example, sounds vaguely familiar, listen to it right after "Pretty Woman."
The success of this music, then, is not due to any innovative technical advances, but rather a restoration and reinvigoration of many diverse and familiar ideas by one individual, an individual who knows the riffs as well as anyone.
Coming attractions
Equally effective is the work' of the • Attractions. The keyboard work is especially impressive, and it is the keyboards which are the instrumental focus of the album. The textural variety of these songs reflects a great variety of keyboard instruments including: upright and grand pianos, harpsichord and the standard electric organ. The predominance of the keyboards over Costello's guitar on Armed Forces contributes to a much denser, fuller sound than in the past. Each cut is saturated with sound, as it were, but at no point does the mix become muddled — this, a tribute to the tasteful production work of Nick Lowe, whose work seems to improve with each outing.
Gone are the days of the "instant records" like My Aim Is True and This Year's Model. Elvis Costello's work has taken a quantum leap with Armed Forces, a leap that can only make you wonder what he can possibly do next. But essential qualities that have distinguished his music in the past remain constant — qualities like immediacy, a snarling spitefulness and, especially, a beguiling ingenuity. Elvis Costello is, nothing if not clever. Who else would begin an album with the line "Oh I just don't know where to begin," spew out songs with venomous lyrics like "She's my soft touch typewriter./ I'm a great dictator" and then end with a song titled "(What's So Funny 'bout) Peace, Love and Understanding?" If this seems mystifying, remember that mystification is just another tactic in Elvis Costello's war, the war of Emotional Fascism.
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