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The gulf between Costello and his contemporaries has grown vast — big enough to make the bald, improvised turmoil of Blood & Chocolate seem like anti-pop. Like rock, Costello can find no new surprises in his head, so he re-visits the haunts of old records and themes with the made energy of a creative mind in thrall to its medium. Blood & Chocolate is yet another endless, exhausting record from rock's outlaw bookworm.
Oldish pop stars sometimes die and more often get a little cracked. He's gone mad, people said of Costello in his recent phase, the one which produced the deeply sane King Of America. The cheerful individual who promoted that LP has now turned back to a savage, battering stance: there's very little respite from the bitten bullet in this gloomy set.
Nick Lowe has produced The Attractions as a polished, slumming garage band. The dominant sounds are a wrenched electric guitar and the saucepan crash of Pete Thomas. You hardly notice Steve Nieve. What can't be escaped is Costello's voice. Not quite the huge, bullying sound that it was in Imperial Bedroom, but Lowe's dry mix seems to force that grimacing, infamous sneer right into your face.
The discomfort carries over into the songs. Costello could've retired after delivering the inconceivably fine "Our Little Angel," but it's the nastiest entrails of King Of America that are continued with here. "Little Palaces" unreels into the even more horrific "Battered Old Bird" — this eye isn't jaundiced, it's sticken.
Compassion isn't something that seeps out of Costello: the people he squeezes in "Poor Napoleon" or "Home Is Anywhere You Hang Your Head" yield nothing but a numb sadness. His regretful victims are still howling over the "him" who is always unbuttoning her clothes. It's hard to say whether the almost classical ripple of his last record or this murky, rollicking-ugly music is more suitable.
For this writer, Costello's constant tumble of punchlines, brilliant talk and rapier stabs have together become a bulk that can't be broken up. "Tokyo Storm Warning" is a Reuters report that drags on forever; "I Want You," the eloquence of skidmarked heart, is too splendidly painful to believe.
Another record. And it's only, for this trapped fellow, pop.
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