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Chameleon Elvis Costello's latest album includes a duet with Daryl Hall, an anti-Reagan jab or two and passing reference to Elvis Presley. Less unified in sound and sentiment than earlier albums and less coherent a package than, say, Imperial Bedroom, Goodbye Cruel World is nonetheless identifiably Costello. The usual gamut of loss, jealousy, pain and envy (to be flip) are run, with a painful amount of accuracy.
Several songs bear the marks of an almost sinister jollity which in its bold musical energy recalls Punch the Clock (Costello's brassy last album) but in sensibility is a dead ringer for Get Happy! tracks. It is significant, perhaps, that the singer performed most of the songs from that particular album on his most recent tour of the U.S. Songs like the slyly malignant "Room With No Number" and "Inch By Inch" are pared-down, although not simplistic, classic Elvis. The breakneck-speed of "The Deportees Club," a song in the same vein, is a good example of the wittily adept lyrics often thrown away on frenetic dance-floor arrangements. (Fortunately, Costello has since the days of Get Happy! seen fit to include lyric sheets.) Lines like "In America the law is a piece of ass" come out quite audibly, nonetheless.
What appears to be a gradual focussing, if not deepening, of anger on Costello's part at the priveleged world in general (the "Motor car kingdom" of the song "The Comedians") and the United States in particular, appears time and again in this album. Manglers of the Irish traditional ballad "Danny Boy" come under fire in "The Great Unknown": again, the singer demonstrates his biting wit with lines like "Now this year's cannon fodder / Tell the future general's jokes / They were keeping the home fires burning / As we slipped out for a smoke." Elvis Presley and his fans, too ("Do you know his mother's last name do you think that he's divine?") are also up for scrutiny in the succinctly titled "Worthless Thing."
Which is not to say that Goodbye Cruel World is without either humour or infectious songs of the sort which contributed to Punch The Clock's success. "I Wanna Be Loved" and "The Only Flame In Town" are cheerful enough, as is the rockabilly swing of "Sour Milk-Cow Blues." No one but Costello, however, would include in this last song lines like "Somebody's suffering but you're glad it isn't you / Put your fingertips up to the screen; Repeat after me, wake at the count of three."
"Peace in Our Time," a followup to recent political songs such as "Pills and Soap" and "Shipbuilding" and more blunt than either — this man is not, had it escaped your notice, a Thatcherite. The hints of "some conspiracy," common to countless Costello songs from "Green Shirts" to "Watching the Detectives" to "Oliver's Army" make themselves known from the first line "Neville Chamberlain's "Condemned man's stare" — and with them, our own craven desire for appeasement at any cost comes under examination. Musically, the song is gentle, almost mockingly idlyllic. In terms of content, however, it is uncompromising. The "International Propaganda Star Wars" wage on, suggests Costello, and it is we who want the man he describes as that "spaceman in the White House." Increasingly, Costello's songwriting serves as an adept, if relatively unfocussed, political tool. Fortunately, his musical prowess prevents such aims from obscuring the medium in favour of the message.
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