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ROCHESTER, Mich. — The angry young man is 27 now, his pugnacious tactics refined into power and challenge and inventiveness.
Elvis Costello has matured; he makes music with smiles as well as scowls, and gives concerts that brace up the brain as well as the dancing feet.
Costello still looks about the same — gaunt and bespectacled like a lesser Dickens character.
But he no longer tears into his music with strangleholds. Last night he filled 90 minutes with a thoughtful variety of songs, demanding the 6,000 to 7,000 people stay alert. Costello will summon up his oldies, but he patronizes neither the music nor his listeners. The party-minded drinkers up on the lawn were persuaded to listen to many ballads, yet roused by zippy versions of such favorites as "Watching the Detectives," "Red Shoes" or "Mystery Dance."
The current three Attractions crisply backed him up like a basement band who've discovered the skills of the conservatory. Lots of piano, too, on the new songs instead of the skinny organ of the earlier Costello years.
Richer, more graded textures were needed for the songs from IbMePdErRoIoAmL — the new album, translated as Imperial Bedroom, though with no connection to Elizabeth's recent pal.
Packed with songs, as always, it is the most self-contained and sustained of his recent releases. All the songs sound finished and complete, the mark of a fully-realized talent. They're often gentle, too, touched with dark undertones resembling the great ironist Randy Newman, to the point of unobtrusive (though probably unnecessary) strings.
Live, the songs were more direct and more fervent, even overcoming Costello's less-than-perfect diction. "Shabby Doll" was large and loping; "Pidgeon English" meditative; the title track a stoic ballad of disillusion; "The Long Honeymoon" a very clever yet wistful resignation of faith in human relations; "Town Cryer" a placid ballad interrupted by a reggae break.
Years ago, in his scornful stage, Costello got scuffed up in a well-publicized scrap that allegedly had a racial overtone. Yet his concert consciously referred to black music, both in songs and in style.
Costello did a driving version of the old Sonny Boy Williamson number, "Help Me," and a velvet ballad he attributed to Bobby Blue Bland who, as he noted, was playing in Detroit the same night (at the Premier Center in Sterling Heights).
Sometimes his ballad singing vibrates like a lower Smokey Robinson — hard to imagine with that husky voice, but the intonation was true. Costello attributed three songs to Smokey, bound to please a Motown crowd, and yet again typically he chose lesser-known Robinson numbers: "Don't Look Back" done reggae; "One More Heartache," and a third that even this Smokey fan didn't recognize.
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