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Elvis Costello brings his bouncy, textured sound back on the road with two shows at Berkeley's Greek Theatre this weekend and a new album, Mighty Like a Rose (Warner Bros.), a collection of quirky and creative songs that brings into focus his abilities as a lyricist and musician.
Whether you enjoy the quaint mixture of 1970s-style backup vocals and carnivalesque organs and calliopes that makes "The Other Side of Summer" stand out, or the dark Celtic mysticism of "Broken," this album is sure to offer something unique and refreshing to your musical collection.
Costello, typically, refuses to give in to trendy words — a fact whose evidence lies in the lyrics themselves, which include such ironic descriptions as "The sun struggles up another beautiful day," "There's a bright future for all you professional liars," and "Any day now a giant insect mutation / Will swoop down and devour the white man's burden" — and as usual, his music is innovative, interesting, and just slightly off center from where you might expect it to fall.
In Mighty Like a Rose, Costello combines a bitter sense of social irony with a relentless desire to better than the same society he disparages. This is a conflict that emerges again and again, as in "How to Be Dumb," a song that concerns a kind of reborn individual facing the world with a newfound sense of confidence and awareness. "Yeah, right," Costello jeers, and throws as many insults in this person's direction as is physically possible. "Now you're masquerading as a pale powdered genius / Whose every bad intention has been purged," the sardonic voice sneers, in a light-hearted, yet still angry verse.
And in "All Grown Up," Costello turns his biting perceptions on yet another "jaded" person — a woman for whom "all of this life has been such a big disappointment." The message of this song could be construed as objectionable, however, because many of the feelings Costello ridicules in such a young person ("You're feeling hounded and pushed around / You want to just lay down and die") hold true for people who have survived some kind of serious trauma, in the past or in a relationship. In this sense, his words "Why don't you stop blaming some guy / And go give the next one a try" sound not only hard-hearted, but also blatantly ignorant of the causes of the "weariness" he feels is so out of place.
Aside from this questionable instance, most of Costello's irony is perfectly justified. "Invasion Hit Parade" deals with the general disintegration into plasticity that he sees happening in all walks of life. "There's no name, no name for the place or pain / we'll cause you again and again / If you do not co-operate with the Invasion Hit Parade," he chirps in a bright key. And "Harpies Bizarre" tackles the issue of the media's role in discrimination and sex roles — "She puts up half-hearted resistance, like she was taught to do" — as well as the unrealistic expectations that widespread images enforce on the members of society: "The waiting lines are long / They never get too far."
"Broken" displays a true musical maturity on Costello's part, with its long, unbroken and extended chords, and its ethereal ambiance, which subtly highlights Costello's mellowed voice. This song sounds like an a cappella ballad that stumbled across some instrumentation — which happened to match it exactly, in tone, depth, range, and eerie feeling. And it is that quality, that mysterious Stonehenge feeling to this music, that makes it support so perfectly the idea of brokenness, of immeasurable solitude, that the words convey ("If I am frightened then I can hide it / If I am crying, I'll call it laughter / If I am haunted, I'll call it my imaginary friend").
The album concludes with "Couldn't Call It Unexpected No. 4," another calliope-laced tune that approaches profound sentimentality and deep-seated doubt about the world from an unexpected (pun intended) angle, turning "a shadow of regret" into a merry-go-round sound that draws from a whole tradition of rising and descending horses and turning mirrors, calliope cuteness and the oddly buoyant, slightly discordant echoes of the harmonium, to communicate once again Costello's feelings of division about society. "Please don't let me fear anything I cannot explain / I can't believe I'll never believe in anything again" stands as both a really neat line and quite an apropos statement for the entire album.
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