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Spike
Elvis Costello
Vic Garbarini
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Some disgruntled rocker once argued that most critics like Elvis Costello because most critics look like him. More to the point, many rock scribes think like Costello — they're bitter, disillusioned idealists. On Spike, Costello's first release for Warner Bros., the song "Deep Dark Truthful Mirror" just about says it all. There are also ditties about Stalin, Macbeth and the imagined pleasures of stomping on Maggie Thatcher's grave. The politics may he correct, but, typically, the attitude is all acerbic nastiness. C'mon, Elvis, no affirmation about anything? True, this is his most musically adventurous album in years, with help from the likes of Roger McGuinn, the Chieftains and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band. But even they can't lift the dark center of his work to any kind of catharsis or transcendence of the misery he documents. The exceptions are his unlikely collaborations with Paul McCartney. On the slightly Beatlesque "Veronica," they combine strengths and mitigate each other's excesses, à la Lennon and McCartney. Elvis' lyrics about a senile grandmother are given wings by Paul's uplifting musical structures — proving that the music itself, sometimes in spite of the words, can transmute a song to a different level. Elsewhere, I'm sure Elvis is giving us as honest a picture of the world as he can, but it's missing a vital dimension -- that of affirmation and hope in the face of adversity. Perhaps Spite would have been a better title than Spike.
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Clipping composite.
Cover and page scans.
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