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The singer's picture is superimposed with the word Trust located above his head. His red glasses are pulled down granny-style, his eyebrows are arched and his eyes have darted to the side in a conspiratorial smirk. He is saying, "the hell it is."
In a way, this is a summation of the Elvis Costello persona that stares back at you from the cover of the l.P from Costello and the Attractions. 1980's Get Happy was a harrowing descent into the maelstrom of embittered love that became darker as the album went on, ending with the futile question ''Can you hear me?" at the record's final fade. Last fall's disappointing compilation of Costello rarities, Taking Liberties, seemed an almost deliberate attack on his fans. And Trust, the third Costello offering in a year, is about anything but trust. Paranoia and sinister goings-on abound on almost every cut, and in most instances the two go hand in hand (as they did on 1978's This Year's Model).
Take "Clubland," the opening cut, for instance. Here Costello takes the seemingly mundane world of the rock club circuit and turns it into a private hell that he dares us to suffer with him. "Don't pass out now, there's no refund / If you find out what you were missing," he laughs while the Attractions play a reptilian samba arrangement. Here Steve Nieve's piano solo conjures up the best moments from all the spy film soundtracks ever written, and the rhythm section of Pete and Bruce Thomas reaffirm the suspicion that the Attractions may become the first rock band to headline a funeral parlor.
Instead of exploring "Clubland"'s devastating effects on innocence, Costello then shows a torture chamber that is more readily available to us: the potentially deadly circumstance of romance.
"Lovers Walk" sets this premise forward in a particularly frightening way. Beginning with a descending bass note resembling a coital moan, the song plunges ahead with pounding high-hat and a piano riff taken right from The Who's "Legal Matter." Costello's horrified chant counter points the chaos perfectly and thus emphasizes it. "Be on caution when lovers walk," he warns as the victims scatter, running from the things that threaten to mow them down, until they inevitably run straight into them.
By the end of the first side, Costello's characters have become completely consumed by sexual frustration and the psychological war wounds that can accompany it. The singer in "You'll Never Be A Man" attributes the affair's collapse to his lover's biological defects ("Are you so superior? Are you in such pain?") until finally he disavows her by screaming, "Don't want to be first, I just won't last!" Later, in "Pretty Words," he blames it on her imagined ingratitude ("You don't know what you got.").
The second side finds Costello making an abrupt about-face as he turns into counselor for the tortured woman. In "New Lace Sleeves" he pleads with her to lose her innocence before she loses her life at the same time, he wishes fervently that the solution weren't so drastic. ''The teacher didn't tell you anything but white lies," he explains, before sighing wistfully, "and you look so good in your new lace sleeves."
The hard-rocking "From a Whisper to a Scream" and the country lament of "Different Finger" brings the focus back on the abrasive relationships from the beginning as the selfishness of the charade becomes apparent "All I want is one night of glory / So put your ring on a different finger before I put out the light," he demands calmly.
By the time that we see "white knuckles on black and blue skin," the violence has exploded. But here Costello indicts the woman for her reluctance to fight back ("You don't have to take it so you just give in").
Costello's attempted portrait of decaying romance comes off as very short-sighted from this point on. The heavily melodramatic "Shot With His Own Gun" is the only blow he aims at the man, and it's full of as many cliched pretensions as the title indicates. Backed only by Nieve's bombastic classical piano, Costello's voice seems to be fighting against the sermonizing but loses in the end.
Trust ultimately ends in one sickening whimper with "Big Sister's Clothes" as Costello suggests that the victims of love get burned because they try to get burned. Everyone secretly wants to visit Clubland and die on foreign sands for the small chance that trust lives there as well. The fact that Costello guffaws at such ideas doesn't make it any easier.
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