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If anything can amount to a kiss of death for Elvis Costello, it's the latest feedback from America's FM-radio programmers, who are hailing his ninth and newest album as his most accessible. For an artist as doggedly adventurous and individualistic as Costello has been, easy pop approval is never a good sign.
Indeed, if Punch the Clock is Costello's most accessible album — with its lightened production touch, punchy R&B horns and sassy backup vocals — maybe that's because it seems his least challenging and inspired. Costello's bracing melodies and punningly profound lyrics took on a startling, Picasso-esque angularity and multiformity on his last album, Imperial Bedroom. This time they go round and round the prickly pear like so many self-parodying jingles.
True to its title, Punch the Clock has a dull-edged, dutiful workmanship about it — Costello writing Costello-ish songs on deadline. As the leading light of Britain's New Wave pop-rockers, an '80s songwriter in the visionary mold of Dylan and Lennon, Costello practically constitutes a genre unto himself; and at his worst here, he falls back dismally upon himself.
"Pills and Soap," for example, is a dour vision of a public numbed by the media while its lambs are led to the slaughter. The song piles up bitter imagery, but its self-righteousness is leaden, deadly, with none of the bristling, flaring paranoia — or breathtaking punch — of an older but similarly pointed Costello song, "Night Rally."
The fact that Costello '83 is simply older and far less innocent than the wunderkind who penned "Night Rally" certainly explains this lack of ingenuousness. But too much of Punch the Clock evokes the sardonic cleverness of Costello's earlier albums, and the results amount to trifling, self-conscious bits of romantic petulance like "Charm School" ("Didn't they teach you anything but how to be cruel / In that charm school"), or rueful throwaways like "Mouth Almighty," or inconsequential ditties like "The Element Within Her," with its lightweight la-la-las.
These are the sort of numbers Costello used to do brilliantly, burningly, or not at all — with a fierceness of purpose and avoidance of cliche that kept his albums virtually free of filler.
On Punch the Clock, there's no such high standard. Songs like "Love Went Mad" or "T.K.O. (Boxing Day)" don't build any interest in the violence of their situations by suggesting the shadowy obsessions of the singer, instead, they hurl images without developing character. Costello used to jolt and reveal a depth of feeling with a singularly telling, well-placed line; here he relies on popped-up choruses to hook us, and they don't.
As one might expect, the few songs that do work have the seamless, effortless, organic quality the others lack. The current single, "Everyday I Write The Book," is a light-textured yet emotionally strong piece of pop-R&B, with soul-angel backup vocals by a duo called Afrodiziak. With its neatly carried conceit — an up-and-down love affair viewed as a novel-in-progress — the song expresses something fresh and timely about how we cope with our passions by romanticizing them ("Even in a perfect world where everyone was equal / I'd still own the film rights and be working on the sequel").
Similarly, "Shipbuilding" — co-written by Clive Langer, who co-produced the album with Alan Winstanley — is an unforced antiwar statement. Inspired by the Falklands war, it doesn't sloganeer, but its imagery is heroically scaled to war's human toll ("Within weeks they'll be reopening the shipyards / And notifying next of kin / Once again / It's all we're skilled in / We will be shipbuilding"). Balanced by Chet Baker's elegiac trumpet solo, Costello's vocal swells and aches in the all the right spots along the perfect melody line.
Songs as affecting as these are rare enough on even better albums than Punch the Clock, which suggests that Costello can't fall flat even when be falls short. Few if any recording artists can evoke the ineffable melodic flair and acerbic whimsy of The Beatles the way Costello can without stooping to mere mimicry — as on an otherwise forgettable song like "King of Thieves," with its gossamer Beatle harmonies.
Ultimately and perhaps unfairly, Punch the Clock comes up short because Costello, over the course of nine remarkable albums recorded in a relative rush of genius, has led us to expect miracles. And more often than not he has delivered, while his three-man band, The Attractions, has matured into the most formidable chamber-rock unit of the '80s. This time around, these gifted players may be recycling their tricks as if by remote control, but the tricks are at least their own.
The most promising thing about Punch the Clock is that it finds Costello at the dry end of a cycle that has led him far afield of his punk and neo-rockabilly impulses. Having since played everything from country crooner to panpop fusionist, he ought to be ready to rock 'n' roll again with a renewed vengeance.
That shouldn't be difficult for him. Even at his weakest. Costello is more attuned than most rock artists to the peculiar evils of modern life, the ways we wound each other as much in word as in deed, the tyranny of beauty and the ugliness of power. Punch the Clock may suggest that Costello's aim is no longer true, but there's no reason to assume his eyes are blind.
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