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Elvis Costello's sheer productivity used to trip him up. A dozen full-length albums from his 1977 debut, My Aim Is True, to the new Spike (Warner Bros. 25848, LP, cassette and CD) haven't been enough to hold his output.
But with Spike, his first album since 1986 (when he released two), Costello has taken the time to make his tunes and arrangements as well crafted — and crafty — as his words. It's his best album since 1981's Trust.
Although Costello's first songs established him as an articulately venomous observer of characters and scenes, he went on to write narratives, free associations, love songs, political parables and pure conundrums, spewing aphorisms as often as other rock songwriters used the word "baby."
But as the songs poured out, almost compulsively, Costello didn't always customize music to words. His verbal facility could make his musical choices seem arbitrary, like random borrowings from a vast record collection.
On his two 1986 albums, King of America and Blood and Chocolate, Costello sang more passionately than ever, but he often spewed out lyrics that were barely tethered to melodies. With Spike, he has realized once again that a rock song travels on its sound as well as its sense.
Spike doesn't confine itself with a literary strategy or musical concept. It's just a group of smart, inventive, polished and disquieting songs — 14 on the LP, 15 on the cassette and CD (and the 15th, "Coal Train Robberies," is worth having) — and it's coherent simply because Costello is at home in styles from pop-rock to gospel to quasi-Irish ballad to funk, and with attitudes from jaundiced sarcasm to righteous anger.
Many of the songs bypass ordinary pop-song structures, sprouting unlikely intros (as in "...This Town...") and radically shifting arrangements ("Miss Macbeth"), and as usual for Costello, even standard pop structures carry nonstandard tidings.
Some of the songs are as straightforward as Costello gets. "Baby Plays Around," written with Costello's wife Cait O'Riordan, is a pristine pop ballad: "To hold on to that girl I had to let her go."
"Chewing Gum," set to dissonant funk recalling James Brown, is about a mail-order marriage that turns disillusioned. "Let Him Dangle" retells a capital-punishment case and concludes "It won't make you even / It won't bring him back."
"Tramp the Dirt Down," a sequel to "Pills and Soap" and "Shipbuilding," Mr. Costello's bitter songs about Margaret Thatcher's England, starts with the image of Mrs. Thatcher kissing an unwilling baby and rises to condemn British callousness and violence: "I never thought for a moment that human life could be so cheap," Costello sings quietly, his voice breaking.
Costello co-wrote two songs on Spike with Paul McCartney, the ex-Beatle whose own recent output suffers from saccharine whimsy.
The buoyant "Veronica" is about a withdrawn old woman losing even her most romantic memories; "Pads, Paws and Claws," arranged with fuzz-toned guitar and plinking marimba (a la Tom Waits) that give way to a rockabilly bounce, sounds as barbed as the romance it describes.
The McCartney collaborations aren't even the songs with the catchiest melodies. "...This Town...," three vignettes about philistinism and materialism, sails into its chorus with chiming glockenspiel and 12-string guitar (from the Byrds' Roger McGuinn): "You're nobody till everybody in this town / Thinks you're a bastard."
Other songs defy synopsis, yet the music makes them resonant. "Satellite," about television and "the thrill of watching somebody watching those forbidden things we never mention," is a floating, slow-dance ballad; "Deep Dark Truthful Mirror," about unfulfilled promise, has a gospelly melody punched out by the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, with Costello belting the song like Van Morrison.
The album has only two missteps: "Stalin Malone," a passable instrumental for the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, and "Last Boat Leaving," whose borrowings (from "All My Trials" and the Beatles' Abbey Road) are too obvious.
But Spike proves that Costello has regained his balance; as in his best songs for the past decade, it's hard to imagine either words or music without the other. And by the time listeners have pieced together the odder songs to their own satisfaction, Costello will probably have finished a sequel.
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