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As misleading a title as last year's Get Happy. Elvis Costello's Trust has about as much to do with faith in the human being as buying a used car from a man wearing a red-checkered sports jacket and dark glasses. The subject is infidelity and Costello, rock music's Franz Kafka, is a victim even when he's the one cheating.
As expected, word-wizard Costello is in top form lyric-wise. He has enough clever phrases, cunning puns and canny double entendres to start a whole new line of "I hear you've been jilted" greeting cards for Hallmark. Fortunately, Costello is as good a song writer as he is prolific (on second thought, nobody's that good), and though his songs are lyric heavy, they don't sound jam-packed like early Springsteen or bad Dylan. Saturated with a chilly, alienated feeling, Costello's deprecating lyrics are accented by throaty vocals and concentrated arrangements.
But Elvis hasn't lost the self-directed sense of humor that highlighted his debut LP, My Aim Is True. In the first cut on Trust, the Beatlesque "Clubland," Elvis sings, "the long arm of the law slides up the outskirts of town, meanwhile in Clubland they're ready to pull them down." Sounding like a witty rewrite of "Heartache Tonight," "Clubland" is described as a den of unfaithfulness where everyone goes to "do the jerk." Costello has the unique talent of giving credibility to bad puns.
In "Strict Time," Costello's primary metaphor is man as ventriloquist puppet, no less, and the fingers creeping up his spine are not his to resist. The hero's plight in this song recalls a great line from My Aim's "Red Shoes" ("you get tired of the lust, but it's so hard to refuse"), while the chorus in the background goes, "toughen up, toughen up, keep your lips buttoned down." Like all the other songs on this LP, Costello sprinkles "Strict Time" with tricky phrases like "weekend witch trial," "musical valium" and "the everlasting cigarette of chastity" all of which evoke interesting images. None of which sound all that pleasant.
Many of the production embellishments used on Get Happy are left out on Trust, thus the Attractions sound raw and punchy. There is more acoustic piano by Steve Nieve than assorted organs, and the rhythm section leads the band instead of Costello's dabbling arrangements of the past. The production, again by Nick Lowe, deliminates the space in the studio and the sound has a cramped feel to it, as if the band were under the bed, singing about what was going on above them.
But Costello's vocal performance is the main reason his songs work while Linda Ronstadt's covers don't. Does he really have a permanently stopped-up nose or does he sing that way on purpose? Whatever, it works.
One critic once said Costello sings as if he had a gun to his back. On Trust, it sounds like he's the one holding it. And on the duet he does with Glenn Tilbrook, "From a Whisper to a Scream," it sounds as if they're covering each other. Such is this LP's paranoia, which lingers over it like Kubrick's Doomsday Shroud.
But while paranoia is usually considered an imagined state of mind, the paranoia on Trust seems the singer's only rational alternative in life. His paranoia has incredible validity, from the example in his own life.
On "New Lace Sleeves," Elvis warns us that "you never see the lies you believe." It's clear that Costello hasn't given up the love equals war view he developed on Armed Forces.
Love is hell. Of course, Elvis sees that we are all especially anxious volunteers.
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