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Ah, summer. The beach, bikinis, surfboards and suntans. Meanwhile...
"The rabid rebel dogs ransack the shampoo shop / The pop princess is downtown shooting up."
And that's Elvis Costello in a good mood.
It's obvious from "The Other Side of Summer," the first song on Mr. Costello's Mighty Like a Rose, that the singer/songwriter hasn't lightened up a bit, despite the season. In fact, Mr. Costello's latest may be his bleakest effort to date, in a career not noted for sunny expressions.
In his jaundiced outlook, Mr. Costello has changed little from the punkish rocker who made his mark with a string of brilliant albums in the late '70s and early '80s, although his targets today are as likely to be political as personal.
Musically, however, his work has grown more and more arcane. And Mighty Like a Rose may be his least accessible album of all.
Lyrically, Rose is obsessed with apocalypse. At least three songs, "The Other Side Of Summer," "Hurry Down Doomsday (The Bugs Are Taking Over)" and "Invasion Hit Parade," are concerned with the breakdown of order and the ensuing chaos.
"Summer," with its ersatz Beach Boys harmonies, is the sunniest — and therefore the most ironic — of the bunch. It also includes a pointed jab at late Beatle John Lennon — "Was it a millionaire who said, "Imagine no possessions"?" Mr. Costello snarls. Ouch.
"Doomsday" is a rave-and-rant set to a voodoo Bo Diddley beat. And "Invasion Hit Parade" is one of Mr. Costello's most musically ambitious works to date, recalling the Talking Heads' "Life During Wartime" in its depiction of a gloomy underground existence.
But while impressive, the murky music and the grim lyrics are off-putting to say the least. It's hard to imagine a Madonna-bred listener relating to or even understanding lyrics like "They emptied out all the asylums, they emptied out all the jails / The "New Bruise" was the name of a dance craze / By 'Jesus Cross and the Cruel Nails'," or humming along with "Harpies Bizarre."
Since 1986's King of America, in which Mr. Costello effectively stripped down his words and music to the bare essentials, his work has grown progressively denser, sometimes to the point of incomprehensibility. On this album, Mr. Costello's wife Cait O'Riordan's song "Broken" stands out as a model of musical and lyrical simplicity Mr. Costello might be wise to emulate on future efforts.
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