|
Armed Forces (CBS) the new Elvis Costello album, is no This Year's Model; it's more mature, self-assured, better played, and finally, not as good.
But then, This Year's Model would be a hard act to follow by anyone's definition; as good an album as anyone has produced in the seventies. Maybe as good as any rock and roll album, period.
Because Model was so good, in fact, Armed Forces held out the disastrous temptation to dish up more of the same; disastrous, because, good as it was This Year's Model was ultimately a thematic dead end. And, I suspect, Elvis was more than a little wary of being comfortably pigeonholed as just one more Angry Young Man.
On Armed Forces he's still angry, but a good deal of it's the anger of self-recrimination: the focus has shifted.
It's shifted a bit musically, too, generally in the direction of sophistication. That's partly a matter of Elvis feeling more comfortable in the studio each time out, partly the fact that the Attractions — bassist Bruce Thomas, drummer Pete Thomas, and organist-pianist Steve Naive — continue to sound like the most refreshingly muscular backing band in ages.
At any rate, Elvis and his band are taking chances these days that were hardly imaginable a year ago; like "Green Shirt," a really astounding bit of Bowiesque space-age chamber music.
Lyrically, Costello seems worried about his public image. The Elvis of Armed Forces is no misogynist. He wasn't on This Year's Model either, really, but the listener could be excused for thinking otherwise. "This Years' Girl," "Lipstick Vogue" and others were nasty enough, certainly, but the object of the cynicism wasn't women in general, just fashionable women. This year's models.
Anxious not to be misunderstood twice in a row, Elvis goes one step further and, on occasion, ("Party Girl"), moves precariously close to the other extreme altogether.
But that wouldn't be exactly true either. Elvis's songs are deceptively complex affairs: they have their points to make but, Angry Yong Man image to the contrary, it takes a few listenings sometimes to figure out what they are. Literal sense sits uneasily on most Costello songs for the first few plays.
That's even truer on the new album, where Elvis's plunge into obscure, fragmented lyrics — which began with "Watching The Detectives" and was in full swing on This Year's Model — reaches either a pinnacle or crisis proportions, depending on your point of view. None of Armed Forces makes literal sense—not on first hearing and not even yet—but it's all tremendously evocative ad, like most Elvis material, it finally does have a point to make.
And the fact that it makes it with a backbeat doesn't hurt a bit.
| 
