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Imperial Bedmom is the new album by a new Elvis Costello, but first a word on the old one.
When Messner brought home a record called My Aim Is True in 1977 with a pigeon-toed nerd on the cover, we all laughed. "Who is this Elvis Costello anyhow?" A big joke.
Then we heard —
"Now that your picture's in the paper bein'
rhythmically admired
and you can have anyone you ever
desired, all you gotta tell me now
is why, why, why, why."
"Welcome To The Working Week"
It kind of clammed up the laughter for awhile. By the time that first album spun itself out we didn't know if this Elvis was king, despite the album cover's hype, but we had a taste of his bitter anger and we wanted more.
"No, don't ask me to apologize,
I won't ask you to forgive me.
If I'm gonna go down, you're gonna
come with me.
You say 'Why don't you be a man about it,
like they do in grown up movies?'
But when it comes to the other way around,
you say you just wanna use me."
"Hand In Hand"
Less than a year later, when Messner brought home This Year's Model, we anxiously listened to a forty-five minute tantrum. For most of the songs Elvis was on alternating ends of a smoking pistol. Either the girl was using him or he was accusing her.
Like a gang of boys consoling their jilted mate, we reveled in Elvis' anger, confusion and frustration at this world of liars and users.
Messner didn't bring home Armed Forces in 1978, I did.
From the color-splattered cover to the inner sleeve with El sprawled dead on a diving board, we got the picture that Elvis Costello's private war with the public world was raging at full scale. Though he changed the album's title at the last minute from Emotional Fascism, no punches were pulled on the songs. Nick Lowe, Elvis' producer, commandeered the dials with a tactical dexterity missing from the previous records. Lyrically, as ever, Elvis aimed low and hit high at everything from corporate guerilla warfare in "Senior Service" to mercenaries in "Oliver's Army" to narrow-minded broadcasters in "Green Shirt." Though Elvis never softened the attack, there were hints that in the eternal battle between men and women, the blows were beginning to take effect.
"And it's the damage that we do and never know.
It's the words that we don't say that scare me so."
"Accidents Will Happen"
In the next year Elvis released forty songs on two albums, the ironically tided Get Happy and the compendium of singles and rarities, Taking Liberties. In these songs the war continued, even accelerated. Meanwhile, we were getting shell-shocked. When Trust came out the bile and suspiciousness and neurotic paranoia had amassed to lethal doses. We began to fear that Elvis, as in his song, was "shot with his own gun." But Trust, detached from the cannon of Elvis' work up to this point, is a brilliant and diverse masterpiece. We accepted the country covers on Almost Blue and, in fact, it opened up the drink-infested, pathetic, traumatic world of Hank Wil-
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