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Elvis Costello hasn't been an angry young man for quite some time. Still, there's enough vitriol left in his veins to start his new album, Mighty Like a Rose, with a wonderful, carcinogenic perversion of the Beach Boys' view of summer. Hearing "The Other Side of Summer" — with a chorus that includes "From the foaming breakers of the poisonous surf... To the burning forests in the hills of Astroturf" — might make you apply an extra helping of sunblock.
Costello follows it up, though, with "Hurry Down Doomsday (The Bugs Are Taking Over)," a technorhythmic litany of apocalyptic doom that he can't quite bring off. Having jettisoned his former backing band the Attractions and assembled a veritable studio supergroup — including drummer Jim Keltner, guitarist Marc Ribot, bassist T-Bone Wolk and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band — the newly hairy Elvis doesn't seem to know quite what to do. He recycles the guitar lick from 1986's "Next Time Round" on "How to Be Dumb" (which might be a grenade lobbed at former Attractions bass player Bruce Thomas or a pointed criticism of the singer himself and other "smart" rockers), strangles the vocals on "Playboy to a Man" (one of two songs on the album written with Paul McCartney) and allows Keltner's fussy, mannered drumming to suck the life out of many of the songs.
Without a firm producer's hand (Mitchell Froom is credited), much of the album — especially the woodwind-encrusted "Harpies Bizarre" — ends up sounding precious.
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