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The last great Elvis Costello LP, 1986's Blood & Chocolate, began with a song called "Uncomplicated," and that's where we left off. The subsequent Spike, Mighty Like A Rose and the misbegotten string confection The Juliet Letters saw our man opting for baroquerie-a-gogo, and yielding at last to his critical image as a slightly Olympian, hyper-literate bard. This made for an uneasy blend of obscurity and rampant obviousness, and it took its toll on his voice too, with a cloying treacly croak standing too often as ironic phrasing.
Where Brutal Youth links up with Blood & Chocolate — apart from marking a reunion with The Attractions — is in its rediscovery of the uncomplicated (but relishably complex) pleasure of the roar — which is this album's dominant voice. It was apparent from the start that Costello was at his best as a songwriter when he left the stitching sparse enough to give room for vocal manoeuvre, rather than weaving the greatest number of shiny verbal beads into his fabric. Against his latter-day songs, which only allowed the daintiest ballet steps, Brutal Youth provides a speedway chicane course. These songs move.
Brutal Youth even reads like a classic EC album. With titles as sneerily concise as "Kinder Murder," "This Is Hell," "Clown Strike," "All The Rage," it could be a follow-up to Armed Forces or Get Happy. In fact, it's not only vintage, it's also the quintessential Attractions album, pastiching past form in the sharpest possible way. Producer Mitchell Froom not only does an effective remould of the ultra-compacted garage sound provided on Blood & Chocolate by Nick Lowe (who is here on bass, somewhere), but he also opens it out into a glossier, more pointed ironic version of itself. The sound's separated out into its elements — here a shuddering bass, there drums clattering in a sardonic aside, everywhere Steve Nieve's keyboards very knowingly giving the impression of running through their effects repertoire.
Some numbers still take the knottiest twists and turns, but the elaboration has a narrative strength that's long been missing. "Sulky Girl," for example, is constructed in layers of disorientating but logical build-up; other songs have effortless false starts. And the textures themselves have rarely been so well knitted into the argumentation — take the Ubu-esque buffoonery in "My Science Fiction Twin," with Nieve's goo-goo eyed sci-fi FX, or the abrasive irony of the "I Feel Fine" quote on the decidedly queasy "20% Amnesia."
But the bottom line is in the vocals. Where Costello has often sounded like someone doing a superb pastiche of an emotive singer, he's reached a new level of projection here — not only as a leather-lunged belter, but as a consummate soul man. "Clown Strike" is so delicately crafted a song that it threatens to fall at any moment into a succession of whispered lines. The delicate, coaxing of the vocal inflexions, over the merest skeleton of a Stax groove, takes it somewhere else entirely.
It's all so much more persuasive than those obvious state-of-the-nation songs where the sense was 99 per cent discursive; on this collection, the vocals encourage you to winkle the meaning out of the words, rather than letting intimations of seriousness carry it all for you. If we're talking in terms of old hands returning from the cold and surpassing all expectations, this is Costello and crew's Short Cuts — it's as young and brutal as that.
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