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On the heels of the mean-spirited muddle of last year's Imperial Bedroom, Elvis Costello has attained a new clarity of vision. And if that vision is often disturbing, it also represents the relentless soul-searching that has characterized his best work.
Punch the Clock (Columbia FC 38897) concerns itself with the many ways we find ourselves enslaved in the modern world — and not only through the workaday experience implied by the title, though breadwinners of various manner and motivation are limned in these brief sketches. War, prostitution, the ravages of age and the niggling mediocrities of marriage — all constitute some form of entrapment in Costello's view, though none so thoroughly snares and saps the spirit as romantic love.
It's a rather bleak perspective, to be sure, but one to which Costello has consistently adhered throughout his prolific career. "I punch the clock and it's okay," he sings with just enough optimism to reveal his irony, "I know a girl who takes my breath away." On "T.K.O. (Boxing Day)," he picks up the metaphor of sex-as-battleground he so cuttingly employed on 1979's Armed Forces, cruelly informing his ring opponent, "Now your birthday suit looks dull and drab."
Never one to be kind to the female sex, Costello repeatedly portrays men as mindless slaves to their baser instincts, women as cunning predators ever on the prowl for fresh victims. "I was committed to life and then commuted to the outskirts," claims the meek spouse of "The Invisible Man," whose sexual fantasies are now confined to a darkened theater. "It's a wonderful world within these cinema walls," he muses, "and you wish she could step down from the screen to your seat in the stalls."
The most disquieting song on the album is also the most melodically alluring. "Charm School" draws a grim little tableau of "a girl with a trick and a man with a calling." Comparing their relationship to a "perpetual nightclub," the protagonist pledges his commitment anyway. But in the haunting chorus, Costello slyly compounds the sense of disillusionment by incorporating the wistfully innocent theme from Summer of '42.
Cumulatively, these songs may seem oppressive, especially for those determined to embrace more benign notions of romance. What keeps the listener from becoming lyrically punch-drunk is the music, Costello's best arrangements, melodies and singing since My Aim Is True. With the added power of the TKO Horns and tasteful vocal backing by Caron Wheeler and Claudia Fontaine, Costello juxtaposes his unflinching jabs at romance with bright pop hooks and fancy melodic footwork.
In all, Punch the Clock may stand as Costello's most honest and well-integrated work to date, provided it can withstand its own vitriolic revelations. Yet with Costello, every milestone is a millstone, every little epiphany an occasion for even more profound introspection. This is what makes him one of the finest songwriters in pop music today. Costello will appear Tuesday night at Merriweather Post Pavilion.
Like Elvis Costello, Graham Parker has vented his fair share of anger and disillusionment, but this is clearly not his mission on The Real Macaw (Arista AL 8-8023). A striking departure from the listless anomie of last year's Another Grey Area, Parker's most recent record finds him more spiritually buoyant and musically brilliant than ever.
Every song on The Real Macaw is thoroughly realized and deftly performed, and Parker's voice has never sounded so confident and vital. Time and again, he gets away with lyrical conventions that none of his songwriting peers (especially Costello) would dare attempt, only because he puts them across with such conviction and integrity.
Macaw shares with Punch the Clock its subject matter and the fact that its creator has reached an artistic peak, but there comparison must end. For Parker's angle on love is at a 180-degree remove from Costello's; he sings emphatically about its quality of endurance, its power to heal and its inherent beauty like a man just discovering the emotion for the first time — a near-perfect antidote to Costello's airless statement.
All of which is not to say the new songs don't express occasional doubts. Indeed, on one of the record's loveliest cuts, Parker apprehends the danger of romantic stagnation with a particularly wary eye, only to fall back in the chorus to the wisdom of the title's admonition that "You Can't Take Love for Granted." Similarly, on "Beyond a Joke," he's realistic about the tailspin a relationship has taken, yet unwilling to take the easy way out and resign himself to failure.
Elsewhere, Parker engages in playful self-mockery. "Just Like a Man," which naturally recalls Bob Dylan's "Just Like a Woman" ("He even cries like a little boy"), runs through a litany of romantic sins between choruses exhorting, "Forgive him, forgive him." And "Glass Jaw" extols the virtues of a woman who renders her wooden-hearted, rock-headed man "almost human."
But the most exuberant and endearing tracks are those that treat love with wide-eyed wonder. "Life Gets Better," "Last Couple on the Dance Floor," "A Miracle a Minute" and the sweetly nostalgic "Anniversary" paint romance on the same sparkling, vivid canvas refreshingly free of the black emotions and gray ambiguities that colored Parker's early work. The Real Macaw rocks as authoritatively as previous Parker albums, but its musical and lyrical balance lend it a stately sensibility that attests to Parker's vastly underrated talents.
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