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Like a lot of you, I got my first dose of Elvis Costello on that near-legendary Saturday Night Live performance. Thoroughly shit-faced and determined to beat John Belushi at his own game, E.C. howled and thrashed his way through "Radio, Radio" like an anti-matter Buddy Holly from a rejected Star Trek script. I was transfixed. Wondering what all that racket was, my mother came in from the kitchen and reacted as though she'd seen a cockroach crawling across the linoleum. I was hooked.
It's too bad that Mom isn't around to hear Mighty Like A Rose. Here an older and perhaps wiser Elvis (he's 36) faces down a midlife crisis the size of a Peterbilt. Feeling the first pull of the downhill slope, E.C. turns his poison pen on himself and in the process makes Camus sound like a party guy.
Set to a deconstructionist Beach Boys beat, the album's opener, "The Other Side of Summer," should find its niche with the guys who wear sandwich signs saying "Repent!! The End is Near!" and the MTVskis who liked the convertible and the cute girls at the beginning of the video. In case we missed the news, Elvis provides us with a laundry list of society's ills from crack to ocean pollution and back again. Smear on some sunscreen, pop it into the tape deck, and watch the used syringes wash up on the beach. But when he throws in "Was it a millionaire who said 'Imagine no possessions'?" the barb isn't aimed so much at the late John Winston Ono Lennon as at the whole rock-star business in general. Present company included. And to pop-rivet the reference closed, "Hurry Down Doomsday, The Bugs Are Taking Over" chucks in "Forget about Beethoven, Rembrandt and Rock and Roll ... / Forget about Buddha, Allah, Jesus and Jehovah," echoing Lennon's "God" from Plastic Ono Band. Rounded out by the self-explanatory "How To Be Dumb," the first act of Mighty Like A Rose could be dubbed "Apocalypse Right Now."
For Act II he could borrow "What the World Needs Now" from Burt Bacharach and plaster on the subtitle: "But You Don't Always Get What You Need." The remainder of the album (with the exception of "Invasion Hit Parade") is a string of sort-of love songs filled with missed connections and lovers no longer loveable. That isn't exactly virgin territory for Costello, but there's a healthy dose of self-recrimination in each of these songs. Try these lines from "All Grown Up": "But look at yourself / You haven't earned the weariness / that sounds so jaded on your tongue"; or this couplet from "After the Fall": "You've changed but not for the better babe / I'd tell you why but what's the use / 'Cos it's the same kind of pity / A drunkard gives as his excuse." Sure, it's risky to take lyrics too literally, especially from as slippery a writer as Elvis. But before you start second-guessing your second-guessing, check out "Broken," by E.C.'s wife, Cait O'Riordan. It's as straightforward and confessional a song as anything he's ever committed to polycarbonate. And on this ballad that's as lovely as it is bleak, he testifies, not once but twice, "But if you leave me then I am broken / And if I'm broken only death remains." Does that sound
like somebody who just got back from a Leo Buscaglia seminar?
Ultimately, the trouble with saying "Life sucks and then you're dead" is that it sort of ends the discussion. So Elvis leaves himself a loophole on the album's closer, "Couldn't Call It Unexpected No. 4." On an album where the rockers sound constipated and the slow songs just ooooze, it's the musical light at the end of the tunnel. Lyrically, it's a half-step back from the abyss. "Please don't let me fear anything that I can't explain / I can't believe I'll never believe in anything again," he sings in a voice quite free of irony. Quite a change from the guy who ended My Aim Is True by repeating "Waiting for the end of the world" to a fadeout.
Nobody's ever bought an Elvis Costello album for the sound, and Mighty Like A Rose is no exception. Mighty sounds a lot like Spike (also engineered by Kevin Killen), which is to say compressed, no low end to speak of (don't be fooled by that opening bass rift), and a narrow soundstage. The one piece of good news is that Killen took something off the top, so the upper-midrange brightness which was a problem on Spike is a little less of one here.
I'll leave you with one of Mom's favorite all-purpose warnings: "Watch yourself." Like strep throat, Mighty Like A Rose has a way of creeping up on you. Play it 30 or 40 times and pretty soon you'll find yourself kicking the dog and buying another Piece of the Rock. Am I suggesting you do that? Is this a great album as well as a great sales tool? "No" on both counts. As soon as I pulled Spike out for a sound check, I realized that this year's model just doesn't stack up. Our final score: major artist, minor album, important new direction, and a beat you can't dance to. But the $64,000 question is still up on the board: Can Elvis Costello's newfound fear fuel his music the way his high-octane anger always has? Stay tuned.
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