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Elvis Costello has always had something to say about the liars, hypocrites, thieves, pimps, cheats, fools and flunkies in every strata of society. Costello has written entire songs filled with clever retorts and elegant putdowns of these types. The notably inelegant Eminem (his generation's angry young man, as was Costello) throttles his targets senseless and then returns to check the color of their bruises. Costello's wit, though, is like a dagger, and it leaves a sexy scar.
On his first straightup rock album since Brutal Youth, he warms up on easy targets like vapid starlets ("Spooky Girlfriend") and teen pop in "Tear Off Your Own Head (It's a Doll Revolution)" mainly, it seems, for being such easy targets to begin with. Has Britney Spears ever been savaged so civilly? Costello has eaten rock royalty for lunch before, and so 'N Sync must seem like a light snack.
"When I Was Cruel No. 2" shows a degree of pity for the cheats and fools, though. Costello's morbid dissection of a party of reputed players follows a gloomy guitar loop. "Fingers once offered are now too heavy to extend," he notes as inertia moves the narrative forward to reveal indiscreet wives and bitter millionaires who were once young thugs. Perhaps Costello, now in his 40s, can see more clearly the gods who hurl the thunderbolts he has been dodging all his life. From cloud level, they look like sad beasts.
Sympathy for the wicked is brief because in a pair of readings of what is essentially the same song ("Dust 2..." and "...Dust"), Costello wishes punishment to visit them. He imagines that the dead skin of the sinners that becomes dust can somehow gather to form a chalk outline to accuse the killers. The dust just gets breathed and passed around, though, until it settles in the groove of the narrator's record, causing it to skip over his accusations.
Costello finds mirth, too. In "45," he uses the vinyl relic to lovingly recall his love affair with rock 'n' roll and changing his name from Declan MacManus after hearing "a rebel in a nylon shirt." In the sweet "My Little Blue Window," the man who once asked, "Do you have to be so cruel to be callous?" tells his love that, "the poison fountain pen needs the antidote." He otherwise remains cruel amid the kindness.
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