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You'd think once would be enough for Elvis Costello.
After his disastrous work with full horn, string, and back-up vocal sections on his 1983 release, Punch The Clock, you'd think Costello would be satisfied that his is a voice not meant to be heard with a large backing group.
But Elvis seems to be a glutton for punishment, and he sucks some up on his latest release, Spike. The LP, Costello's first on a major. label (Warner Brothers) in numerous years, features 14 originals from the prolific Irishman, who has actually cut back from his Get Happy! days, when he stuck 20 songs onto a single album.
Judging from past experience, Costello has obviously enjoyed his excursions into differing musical genres; see his country and western trek in Almost Blue and his blues trip in "Eisenhower Blues" (off The Costello Show's King Of America LP).
But with Spike, he takes a foray into everything at once; he uses the widest array of instruments ever assembled on a Costello album. Along with the normal assortment of electric, acoustic, and bass guitars, snare and bass drums, and keyboards, there are (take a deep breath) accordions, Baldwin spinets, bazookas, Chinese drums, clavinets, crash-boxes, double basses, fiddles, glockenspiels, Indian harmonium, Irish harps, lunge maracas, Magic Tables, mandolins, marimbas, Martian-Dog barks, metal pipes, Oldsmobile hubcaps, snowbells and ship's bells, tambourines, tiompans, Tympani, Uileann pipes, vibraphones, and Xylophones. Whew.
Add to that the work of the "Dirty Dozen Brass Band," featuring two trumpets (Gregory Davis, Efrem Towns), two saxophonists (Kevin Harris, Roger Lewis), a sousaphonist (Kirk Joseph) and the occasional trombonist (Charles Joseph), and you can see what kind of a din and racket Costello is putting together on this album.
Unfortunately, somewhere in all the instruments and musicians (including, on separate tracks, Paul McCartney on bass, and Chrissie Hynde on backing vocals,) the basic essence of Costello's appeal, his scratchy, scrawling vocals, are lost.
This is especially apparent in the opening track, "...This Town..." Costello is swallowed up in a song that sounds like a messy closet always cluttered to the point of insanity. In "Chewing Gum," one of Elvis' best vocal performances on the LP, he is shot down by a sousaphone bass-line that is repeatedly followed by a sporadically intermittent burst of guitar from Marc Ribot. The whole song jerks and moves in fits, as if each instrument's part was written at separate times and then haphazardly thrown together in the studio at recording time.
Looking back, most of Costello's greatest songs in his 13-year career have featured simple instrumental arrangements providing a subdued background for the vocal mastery of Elvis — songs like "I Want You" (Blood & Chocolate), "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" (King Of America), "I'm Not Angry," and "Alison" (both from the stunning 1976 debut album, My Aim Is True).
Indeed, "Alison" comes readily to mind when listening to songs off Spike such as "Baby Plays Around." The message in "Baby" is so brutally obvious that it hits the listener on the head like a weighty anchor: "And so it seems I've always been the last to know/ To hold on to that girl, I had to let her go/ I wish to God I didn't love her so/ 'Cos baby plays around." Compare that cliched tripe with the wistful and sorrowful lines from "Alison": "It's so funny to be seeing you after so long, girl/ And with the way you look, I understand that you are not impressed/ But I heard you let that little friend of mine/ Take off your party dress."
Even though the message in "Let Him Dangle," an anti-capital punishment song, has merit, that still doesn't save it from being trite — when Costello lets out a tortured screech of "string him up! " it merely seems to be a parody of U2's crusading Bono, not the real Elvis.
But not all of Spike is without merit. "Tramp The Dirt Down" features a biting yet witty criticism of Conservative British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. "I saw a newspaper picture from the political campaign/ A woman was kissing a child who was obviously in path/ She spills with compassion, as that young child's face in her hands she grips/ Can you imagine all that greed and avarice coming down on that child's lips." And on the closing cut, "Last Boat Leaving," Elvis' voice emerges from the musical fog to fish out another quality Costello ballad.
But the biggest redeeming factor for Spike has to be the tune "God's Comic," in which the full accompaniment (13 different instruments) is finally integrated with Costello's vocal contortions. The lyricism is fine, and this stands out as the best song on the LP.
Compared with earlier stellar album like Imperial Bedroom, My Aim Is True, Trust, and Get Happy!, Spike is simply driven into the ground. But when compared to much of today's modern music, Spike deserves as much credit as any other mediocre album from an established star, such as Bruce Springsteen's Tunnel Of Love.
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