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Elvis Costello has been laying the groundwork for his latest record, Brutal Youth, for a long time. From the dense, often labored song-craft of albums like the late-Eighties Spike and (especially 1991's Mighty like a Rose through noble failures like last year's The Juliet Letters, Costello was guilty only of trying too hard to maintain his status as the pre-eminent songwriter of his time. Now, with Brutal Youth, he refines and clarifies his art by focusing sharply on what he does best — boring through the thicket of human interactions with lacerating wit and a musical attack to match. Fittingly, the effort reunites him with the musicians who participated in his greatest successes: his old band, the Attractions (Steve Nieve, Pete Thomas, Bruce Thomas), and his erstwhile producer, Nick Lowe, who here shares bass duties.
In fact, Brutal Youth, which was co-produced by Costello and Mitchell Froom, winds up sounding like the Great Lost Elvis Costello and the Attractions Album, a worldly neo-punk broadside that could easily be filed between This Year's Model and Armed Forces. Like those classics, it's a big chunk of a record to digest; its fifteen songs are as dense and unrelenting as anything Costello's ever recorded, more like novellas than the average songwriter's short stories. But only one clocks in at over 5 minutes (the moody, keyboard-drenched "Sulky Girl"), and the band runs as clean and hot as a well-tuned engine on such numbers as "20% Amnesia," a blast of rebel rock that features Costello in full-throttle scream throughout.
The album's musical standout is "Clown Strike," a breezy soul strut that could easily merit a spot on a beach-music jukebox. Lyrically, Costello taps into a motherlode in "London's Brilliant Parade," a detailed catalog of urban obsessions defining his love/hate relationship with the city whose spirit he interprets with as sure a hand as Lou Reed dissects New York. It's a theme explored in depth on Brutal Youth, as Costello, returning to the scene of the crime, sifts through the evidence of a profligate age and draws up a canny indictment in which even he does not stand unaccused.
From start to finish, Brutal Youth reveals an artist fully in control. Amazingly, time hasn't mellowed Costello and the Attractions — it's made them that much more muscular and knowing. Costello even looks more like himself on the cover than he has in years — clean-shaven, horn-rimmed, back in fighting trim, face fixed in a delightfully jaundiced smirk. This Elvis, I'm pleased to note, has not left the building.
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