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MOUNTAIN VIEW — A decade and a half ago, Elvis Costello spat anger all over his music in pounding rhythms, distorted riffs and embittered lyrics. He's been stuck ever since with the angry young man label, though his talent quickly out-grew that niche.
Today, of course, Elvis is pushing 40, so the title of his superb new album, Brutal Youth, is less self-definition than retrospective description. On Brutal Youth — which reunites the singer-songwriter with his original band, the Attractions, after a hiatus of seven years — anger still drives the music. But it's anger viewed from a mature distance, sometimes wryly, sometimes ruefully, sometimes bitterly, but always in control.
Control, of course, was the never-achieved dream and nightmare of the younger Elvis Costello's persona: control of his anger, his body, his lover, and the public mind. On stage Saturday night at Shoreline Amphitheatre — where he and the Attractions played a two-hour set spanning their 17-year recording career — it was plain that Costello has now achieved perfect control, albeit of a different sort. He is now sole commander of his voice, his guitar, his band, and his music.
The Attractions — fantastical keyboardist Steve Nieve, bassist Bruce Thomas and drummer Pete Thomas — were always the best interpreters of Costello's songs. But for years their live shows were a losing, if thrilling, battle with chaos. They'd drive the tempo past the lyrics, overwhelm Costello's strong but raw voice, and triumph more through performing bravado than musical expressiveness. At times they seemed to take Costello's anger more seriously than he did himself.
Over the years, Costello kept looking for ways out, first with the Attractions and more recently without them. These extracurricular forays, some remarkable achievements and some brilliant mistakes, set the stage for Brutal Youth — on which Costello achieves a perfect union between youthful brutality and mature insight.
If there was any doubt that the not-so-youthful singer and his band could still pump it up, the opening trio of vintage songs at the Shoreline show — "No Action," "High Fidelity" and "The Beat" — dispelled it. The Attractions can still cram more energy into one song than their opening act, the mediocre Canadian band Crash Test Dummies, put into a whole set.
But today the energy is in harness to the songs. Costello phrases his lyrics to be heard; he sings his own backup choruses now — his bandmates don't even get mics. And his vocal range allows for a contemplative note and even, sometimes, a softness (as on the Kinks-like "London's Brilliant Parade") that sets the angry songs in more powerful relief.
The anger is still there, to be sure; it's just more carefully targeted, and less of a posture. The two-chord "Kinder Murder," for instance, is as incensed a song as Costello has ever written. But instead of spraying its rage out in semi-meaningless wordplay, it's a chillingly specific protest song about sexual violence. And Brutal Youth's penultimate "All the Rage" recaps the kind of wounded rant Elvis used to specialize in — but in a self-accusatory vein, set to a chiming waltz.
The set arrangements at the Shoreline show created a sly dialogue between the older songs' adolescent frustrations and the current ones' ironies — as in the pairing of "Mystery Dance," a quintessential yowl of sexual dissatisfaction, with the new "Just About Glad," a sigh of relief for not having consummated a dubious affair.
There's no guarantee that Brutal Youth's articulate, controlled Elvis won't be just another phase. As he sings in "All the Rage": "Don't try to touch my heart, it's darker than you think — and don't try to read my mind, because it's full of disappearing ink." Still, too often pop music is a kind of disappearing ink itself, culturally absorbed and evaporated in a blink, Costello remains the kind of artist who knows how to heat it up and etch it in.
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