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Elvis Costello may or may not be a happy man, but he is certainly well on his way to establishing himself as the premiere pop vocal stylist and songwriter of our generation. He creates a brand of popular music so alive and vital and desperately urgent that you get nervous just being alone in the same room with one of his records on the turntable.
With the release of Taking Liberties, a compilation album of previously unavailable material, Costello's formidable reputation as the messiah of this modem music is secure.
As a collection of old material Taking liberties is bound to seem as if it places the career of "Elvis with a C" in a holding pattern, but only because every other album by this man has represented such an advance over its predecessors in terms of musical styling and sophistication.
The ultimate effect is a genuine pleasure: Elvis has been responsible for more memorable moments in four years as a singer and songwriter than most recording artists deliver over the course of a professional lifetime, and the rest of the world needs time to catch up.
Taking Liberties has its share of such memorable moments, all of them true to the traditional breeding ground of the source material for an Elvis tune, a dark land of emotional fascism and destructive love-hate relationships. "Losing you / is just a memory / Memories / don't mean that much to me," sings Elvis in "Just a Memory," a ballad that leaves you feeling that he is trying to convince himself, as much as anyone, of the truth of what he has written.
And for anyone who has ever struggled with the awful realization that they have been trying to live their life with the wrong person, a song like the countryish "Stranger In the House" ("This never was one of the great romances..."), is going to become something like an anthem.
Not all of Taking Liberties is obsessed with the sad frustrations of domestic situations gone bad, however. There is the classic "I Don't Want to Go to Chelsea," as well as its enigmatic companion tunes "Tiny Steps" and "Night Rally." New versions of "Black and While World" (better than the one on Get Happy), and "Clowntime Is Over" (a plodding disappointment) are included, as is Elvis's own tumbledown rendition of "Girls Talk," which was a hit for Dave Edmunds.
Costello also proves himself to be a good, if not great, interpreter of other people's material with his haunting cover of Richard Rogers' famous "My Funny Valentine," and a gritty version of Van McCoy's old R&B hit "Getting Mighty Crowded."
Media attention is already being paid to "Radio Sweetheart," the obvious choice for a single here, but the real achievement of Taking liberties is to be found in other places.
Listen to the burning pace and joyfully butter confusion of emotional and legal tender in our consumer society on "Clean Money," or the weirdly rythmned "Horror Factory," a tribute to the squalor that our industrial world has created. Most importantly of all, listen to "Big Tears." The epic feel of the production with its Mick Jones guitar track, its farfisa organ sound, and the anguished quality of our hero singing as if he really does hope that he dies before he grows old all combine to make this song unforgettable.
It may become, in time, what "Won't Get Fooled Again" for the Who. While we're waiting for history to decide exactly how crucial the contributions of "Elvis with a C" to the popular music of the last half of the twentieth century are, however, we all have something to be thankful for in the meantime.
There's a new Elvis Costello record in town.
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