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The best way to sum up the strategy Elvis Costello used to create his latest and fourteenth American release, Spike, is "Strength in Numbers." With a guest list that includes talent as diverse as Paul McCartney, Chrissie Hynde, Allen Toussaint and Roger McGuinn, it's possible to find virtually every pop style in the English-speaking world on this record. And over the course of the album, this becomes a significant flaw; like Trust and Goodbye Cruel World, Spike fails to cultivate a consistent sound or musical identity to connect the songs.
For a songwriter as eclectic as Costello, it is absolutely fundamental to establish some common musical language for an album to maintain its purpose and focus. Normally, the Attractions achieve this for Costello, but even on King of America, the stark arrangements centered around acoustic guitar give the music a basic and clear foundation. Spike, lacking this, tends to wander aimlessly from dialect to dialect.
Sunk beneath this Zelig-like exterior, the songs themselves betray a similar lack of commitment. Costello's best work has always been impassioned and immediate, captivating the listener's imagination from the very first playing. On this album, the songs are too oblique even to maintain their relevance, much less a sense of drama or emotional resonance.
It's difficult to understand the value of an image like, "How could she know as she stepped through the lights, that her dress would become transparent" (from "Satellite"), and even harder to invest much concern in the situation it describes. Similarly, "Let Him Dangle" is a fairly moving song about capital punishment, but the story it tells of a 1952 British murder case does little to intensify the importance of the issue, at least for an American audience.
Perhaps part of the problem facing Costello is the familiarity of his vitriol — his audience has become immune to it. As Mick Jagger phrased it early in the 19th century, "There's not much left to attack." This is certainly the difficulty which "Tramp the Dirt Down" fails to surmount. As an attack on Margaret Thatcher, it contributes nothing further to the drama Costello created with "Pills and Soap" and "Little Palaces," and cannot even mimic the intensity of these earlier songs.
To his credit, it is impossible to imagine Costello producing a downright failure on the level of a recent Bob Dylan or Neil Young release: he's too conscientious and consistent to trash his reputation so unceremoniously. But it's not much of an accomplishment to say that to of the best songs on the album were co-written with Paul McCartney, Costello should be setting his sights a bit higher than working on the level of the man who collaborated on "Ebony and Ivory" and "The Girl Is Mine."
Regardless of this, there are a few other gems among the dross here. "Chewing Gum," despite its tawdry narrative about mail-order brides, features an eccentric, near-funk arrangement that stands as the musical highlight of the record.
Likewise, "Deep Dark Truthful Mirror" gracefully evokes major-influence Randy Newman, and in this company a first-rate imitation rises majestically over many of the more typical Costello gestures. When Costello tries to extend Newman's legacy, however, on "God's Comic" — a re-write of the classic "God's Song" — he fails to generate the power to compete with the original.
Similarly, when Costello uses Michael Blair and Marc Ribot, veterans of Tom Waits' band, to re-create Waits' idiosyncratic sound, he fails to tailor his writing to their skills. Whereas Waits uses these players in a kaleidoscope of contexts to heighten the dramatic impact of his jagged, often surreal imagery, on these songs they remove Costello's characteristically direct writing from a sympathetic musical setting.
Thus, Costello's failure with this release is more architectural than inspirational. As is often the case with Costello, the failure is one of confidence. Indeed, a distressing pattern emerges over the course of his career. When he has produced masterpieces, like Imperial Bedroom and King of America, he has followed them with accessible, pop-oriented records — Punch the Clock and Blood and Chocolate respectively — and then relative failures like Goodbye Cruel World and the current release. As a result, his career gains no momentum, and he is left, like Randy Newman, with a smaller audience than his talent deserves.
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