Before it gets buried in what follows, Spike, Elvis Costello's fifteenth album, is a major, meaty record, perhaps his best one, and almost certainly bound to be regarded as one of the top five of 1989. It shimmers and sparkles and moves and tugs at the heart and mind at every stop, and it has the eclectic density of a greatest hits package.
Whether you listen to it on LP, with its 14 tracks, or on cassette and CD, with all 15, the result is the same: Spike blows away almost everything he's done in the '80s, fulfilling every promise made by Imperial Bedroom, This Year's Model and My Aim Is True.
The playing is exquisite, the songwriting dazzling, and the sequencing magical — though those with CD players might want to try this from-a-whisper-to-a-scream sequence: 11, 7, 13, 15, 9, 5, 3, 2, 8, 12, 6, 10, 14, 1, 4 (or backwards for a scream-to-a-whisper effect).
The big debate of the spring season is already shaping up: Is Spike Costello's best album? Some make convincing claims for 1982's Imperial Bedroom, others stay loyal to his first three albums — 1977's My Aim Is True, 1978's This Year's Model and Armed Forces — and a few even hold out for 1980's Get Happy!! and 1981's Trust.
If Imperial Bedroom is Costello's Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, then Spike is his Abbey Road. Where the former is fussy, the latter is direct; where the former is preoccupied with production tricks and embellishments, the latter is primarily song — centered. Both are brilliant, but Spike has all the content and inspiration and half the pretension of Imperial Bedroom.
To be sure, Imperial Bedroom's rapid-fire barrage of great tracks — from "Human Hands" and "You Little Fool" to "And In Every Home" and "Pidgin English" — proved that Costello's songs are at least as great as any written in the rock era. But repeated listening shows that the album doesn't really swing, and that its production values sometimes threaten to overwhelm the songs.
This is made painfully clear by listening to bootleg recordings of Imperial Bedroom songs performed during Costello's '82, '83 and '86 tours. "Shabby Doll" is infinitely more appealing in its funked-up concert arrangement; "And In Every Home" has a groove and flow obscured by its album version; the live "Pidgin English" is slimmed down enough so that it actually works as a medley with "Hand In Hand"; "Kid About It" sounds unforced live where Costello doesn't artificially change octaves for the chorus; and "You Little Fool" almost works better as a folk song. All of this is a long way to say that Imperial Bedroom's songs are beautifully written but often poorly arranged.
This can not be said about the songs on Costello's first three albums, which have never been effectively re-arranged, because their versions are definitive. One need only recall the flat, piano version of "Accidents Will Happen" on the Live At Hollywood High single or the silly Punch The Clock-tour rendition of "Watching The Detectives" to understand that the early songs' arrangements are necessary and therefore fixed.
This is truly surprising when one considers that Costello's first album, 1977's My Aim Is True, wasn't even recorded with the Attractions. One would think that My Aim Is True is theoretically the album least carved in stone, since it was recorded with a group of rather incompatible players named Clover (Huey Lewis' backing band). Still the Attractions have never significantly bettered the Clover versions of those songs.
Costello's first album with the Attractions, 1978's This Year's Model, was long considered by critics and fans as his best work until Imperial Bedroom muddied the issue. Today, it still stands as a scathing, razor-sharp attack, a Between The Buttons-like capsulization of Costello's early "guilt and vengeance" ethos, an album whose unusual intensity allowed critics to overlook its obvious, flawed brevity.
If there was ever a point at which Costello seemed likely to take it all the way and enter the ranks of super-stardom, it was in 1979, following the release of Armed Forces. That album sounded big and great and glossy, and it turned him into a bonafide pop star in Britain and a major cult-phenom in America, where he rode the cresting new wave like an expert surfer. But all the fame and publicity became overwhelming for a guy who had been a computer programmer at a bank just a few years earlier. The Attractions broke up briefly and then reformed, and Costello wasn't heard from on vinyl for more than a year, until the release of 1980's Get Happy!!
Get Happy!!, for all the unmitigated brilliance of its second side, was marred by what one critic has called "cramped programming" cramming 20 songs, many of them sketchy, onto one 45 minute disc. Fans heard Get Happy!! as an abandonment of the Costello sound as they had come to know it on his first three albums — and indeed, Costello has only returned to that sound once, in 1986 for the masterful Blood & Chocolate throwback.
1981's Trust, an album that has several great tunes but no cohesion, is overrated but nonetheless spectacular. "Clubland" is unfocused (except in concert where the song's stern piano figure unifies it); "New Lace Sleeves," written when Costello was a teenager, is tentative, as is "Big Sister's Clothes"; and "Shot With His Own Gun," which resembles the Hollywood High version of "Accidents Will Happen," might have benefited from a full-band arrangement.
But Costello is one of the few artists who has never made a completely lousy album; the only one that comes close, and it does come close, is Goodbye Cruel World, which he now admits was a mistake. Even his country experiment, Almost Blue, has an enduring appeal, and his collections of B-sides and outtakes Taking Liberties and Out of Our Idiot — feature some of his best work, albeit alongside some of his worst.
If Costello's first phase is summed up by Armed Forces, and his second by Imperial Bedroom, then his third phase — and perhaps his entire career — is crowned by Spike.
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