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Costello does some of his best singing on these 20 songs and (more frequently) song fragments, but the sound can't compare with the richness and complexity of either This Year's Model or Armed Forces.
Chances are, this is semi-deliberate. This is a random sketchbook of ideas, not a fully conceived album. But the sketchbook concept isn't really satisfying. Those songs which are well developed, such as "The Imposter," "Secondary Modern," "I Stand Accused" and "I Can't Stand Up for Falling Down," present an equally fragmented personality, as chock full of desperation and as twisted by puns as any of Costello's earlier work.
The rest are merely querulous, like echoes of bad dreams, spooky, restless, not necessarily without meaning but not necessarily as profound as their hints of terror would initially make you think. The sound is suitably, and obviously deliberately, murky, which is great, unless you think that it was the precision on Costello's last album, Armed Forces, which made it his best. I do, but then, I'd settle for the vitality and intelligence of Get Happy, a title on which the artist, thankfully, has no intention of delivering.
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