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Elvis Costello is at an awkward stage in his career. He's more popular than ever, but still too much the exquisitist for his surgically sharp lyrics and quicksilver melodies to really survive the move to arena-rock.
So it seemed last night at the San Diego Sports Arena, as the British singer-songwriter and his band, The Attractions, performed to some 5,000 fans who didn't much mind that the cavernous acoustics made mush of Costello's words and music. He is, after all, the leading light of '80s rock artists — an increasingly classy act whose immense talent and sardonic, cooled-out charisma shine through even in the worst of settings.
If anything last night, Costello may have been overcompensating for the muddiness with a somewhat strained performance, heavy on the rhythm-and-blues side of his music and marked by some drawn-out soul vocal codas. Otis Redding he's not, but rather a great non-voice — nasal yet powerfully focused — in the tradition of Bob Dylan or Pete Townshend. Costello's best singing is a matter of nuanced emotion that shifts from tough to tender, proud to pained, and resolves itself with the high lyric drama of each song.
Last night he had his best moments with a sophisticated repertoire of material drawn largely from his Get Happy!, Trust and Imperial Bedroom albums, and avoiding all but the highlights of his current — and weakest — album, Punch The Clock. Indeed, Costello has a wealth of superb songs dense-packed in his last few discs, and if nothing else, last night's show was a pageant of rediscovery for such gems as "Possession," "Secondary Modern," "New Lace Sleeves" and "Man Out Of Time."
It was also a measure of Costello and company's passage into pop's most polished league. With his eyeglasses, dark suitings, defensive guitar stance and the politesse of a maitre d', Costello is something akin to Buddy Holly Meets The Godfather, and at this point he has the image down to a science. When he attaches it to a brilliant, evocative bit of hard-boiled reggae such as "Watching The Detectives" — with the crowd gasping and cheering to the payoff lines — he is nothing less than a superstar.
And his current tour features some superstar design in the series of backlit vertical scrims that turn the stage into a three-dimensional tableau of gorgeous pastels and moody patterns. But that's as far as the glitz goes, with no more than a horn section to punch things up and the brief vocal backups of a female duo called Afrodiziak, who chimed in for last night's encore version of Costello's current hit, the light-handed "Everyday I Write the Book."
Otherwise, Costello — a taut rhythm guitarist — and his three-man group deliver a lot of compelling music, even if last night's poor sound often muffled it to a dull roar. But keyboardist Steve Nieve's baroque piano flourishes and witty electronic accents were effective foils to Costello's rich, cerebral tunes, while bassist Bruce Thomas and drummer Pete Thomas were the spidering, pulsing web.
Unfortunately, too much of all that — especially Costello's punning lyrics, which are hard enough to decipher on a good stereo — was lost to the arena, and there were too many moments when either Costello or the band seemed out of step, rushed, straining over each other. But there was also enough magic — in Costello's poignant version of the anti-war ballad "Shipbuilding," or in the eager, unaffected, troubadouring way he led off the show with a just-written song — to carry the night.
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