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Two of the most prolific songwriters in contemporary rock music, Elvis Costello and Bruce Springsteen, add more songs to their collected works on two new albums.
Costello, always noted for his consumer-pleasing, chock-full LPs, has 15 songs on his latest. Springsteen, despite working on his own future album, has contributed seven songs to Gary U.S. Bonds' lastest LP.
"IbMePdErRoIoAmL" Elvis Costello & the Attractions (Columbia Records). Some of the lyrics are as anagrammatic as the album's title ("IMPERIAL bedroom"), and Costello continues to paint modern love sardonically as a vast battlefield between the sexes. But the real news here is the development of his musical and songwriting craft.
Many of the 15 songs here are either ballads or middle-tempo tunes with the pop-jazz flavor of Steely Dan, such as the piano on "Shabby Doll." And all of the songs reveal a careful sense of structure, much more so than Costello's earlier new wave songs.
"Beyond Belief" opens side one with a barrage of barbed words in a variety of voices — all Costello's. He shows stunning virtuosity in his shifting tones here and throughout the album, even using falsetto against bass at one point in "Tears Before Bedtime," the second song.
"Shabby Doll" contrasts a bright melody with a lyric full of spitting recriminations. It is followed by "The Long Honeymoon," a slow samba telling of a wife waiting at home for her husband: "There's been a long honeymoon; she thought too late and spoke too soon; there's no money-back guarantee on future happiness."
Different kinds of desperation are traced in "Man Out of Time" and "...and In Every Home," songs that sandwich "Almost Blue," the album's most haunting and sensitive tune, done as a torch song with cocktail-jazz piano.
"The Loved Ones" opens side two exuding anger through ironically cliches. "Human Hands" is a paranoid love plea that is very believable. "Kid About It" a jazzy ballad about "making love tooth and nail," and "Little Savage" again explores love as aggression.
"Pidgin English" deals with the problem of saying "I love you" in a hostile world. Costello makes musical references to the Beatles' "She's Leaving Home" on the more jaundiced, but just as tenderly melodic, "You Little Fool." And the album ends with the double entendre "Town Cryer," dressed in brass and strings and full of sad wisdom.
This is Costello's most finely realized album, one that moves him into the front rank of contemporary songwriters.
"On the Line" Gary U.S. Bonds (EMI America Records). Bonds' gritty yet poignant gospel-tinged style is a direct descendant of Sam Cooke and Otis Redding, and Bruce Springsteen supplies it with seven good songs here, including one about being out of work and another about a married couple in trouble.
Springsteen also comes up with his most affecting love song on "All I Need," a catalog of what "some men need" that resolves into the chorus: "You're all I need in this world, girl."
Bonds also contributes two tunes, one of them a very funny sad-sack narrative by a hapless fellow who only wants to play his radio loud: "Turn the Music Down."
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