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Elvis Costello's Spike (Warner Bros.), the British singer's first release in 2½ years, is very different from his first three albums, which landed like bombshells on the rock world in 1977-78.
In its way, though, Spike is just as successful, for it captures the 33-year-old professional Costello has become as accurately as those early albums captured the 22-year-old misfit he once was. One can only be an "angry young man" for so long without becoming a self-parody, and Costello has been smart enough to make his music keep pace with his life.
Where those early albums burst with fury, Spike is more likely to savor the ironies of the world.
Where each of those early albums focused on one obsessive sound, Spike is all over the stylistic map, exercising Costello's fondness for New Orleans jazz, Irish folk music, British cabaret and Beatlesque rock.
Where those early albums found Costello playing with fellow nobodies from London, Spike finds him playing with such current peers as Paul McCartney, Chrissie Hynde, Allen Toussaint, Roger McGuinn and co-producer T-Bone Burnett.
What links this new album with its predecessors is the songwriter's acerbic intelligence. It's been six years since British contemporaries like Joe Strummer and Johnny Lydon made an important record, but Costello's grasp of songcraft has allowed him to outlive the brief moment of the punk movement. If he can no longer plausibly supply the purity of a young man's anger, at least an over-30 writer can provide the pleasures of skill. And Costello now writes better songs than just about anyone in rock 'n' roll.
The cover of Spike features a green wool plaid representing the singer's Irish roots, a blue satin plaque in the shape of his new record company's logo and the singer himself in two-tone clown paint reminiscent of the cover for Randy Newman's Born Again.
Inside is a generous helping of 14 songs, including three that celebrate those Celtic roots with help from members of Ireland's top folk bands, De Danann, Planxty and the Chieftains.
"Any King's Shilling" is a lovely, acoustic air, but it delivers a veiled warning to someone who's working for the wrong side of Northern Ireland's civil war.
"Tramp the Dirt Down" recasts Bob Dylan's fantasy of standing on the graves of the "Masters of War" as a traditional Irish ballad aimed directly at Maggie Thatcher.
The Irish folk musicians join New Orleans' Dirty Dozen Brass Band on the peculiar cross-fertilized sound of "Miss Macbeth," an unsparing portrait of a spinster schoolteacher, who represents Puritans everywhere.
Although Costello is most often praised for his lyrics, he's a quite sophisticated composer as well, incorporating jazz changes into rock 'n' roll better than anyone since Steely Dan and Stevie Wonder.
The Dirty Dozen, who play on two other songs plus one instrumental, flesh out the harmonic possibilities of these jazz-tinged compositions dramatically.
In similar fashion, Costello pursues his interest in the satiric cabaret of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill on songs like "Let Him Dangle" and "God's Comic," tuneful but vicious attacks on capital punishment and the establishment clergy. Working with Marc Ribot and Michael Blair from Tom Waits' band, Costello creates a most effective cabaret-rock sound, full of moving bass and oddball percussion.
When word leaked out that Costello was co-writing songs with Paul McCartney, many observers were astounded, but Costello has often included Beatlesque melodies and production touches on his later records, and McCartney had previous experience co-writing with a caustic, literary songwriter.
Spike unveils two products of those sessions, including the album's first single, "Veronica," which features a glorious McCartney pop melody and a sly Costello lyric about a young woman so confused by adult sexual roles that she's not even sure of her own name.
As good as the rest of Spike is, this eclectic album is at its best when Costello applies his gifts to McCartney's pop mainstream. McCartney's bass helps thicken the circus-like sound of Costello's "...This Town...," which mocks self-pitying romantics; Chrissie Hynde adds gorgeous harmonies to the strong melody of "Satellite," which steps back for some real perspective on romantic problems.
On these songs, the pleasures of Costello's pop craftsmanship and the stimulation of his subversive lyrics reinforce each other in ways the songwriter couldn't even have attempted when he was young and green.
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