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His most accessible and richly realized album, Trust appears an under-appreciated casualty of an anti-New wave backlash. That's ironic, given the conservative musical sensibility embodied here. But it's also an apt situation for a record which reflects many of the contradictions which have fueled the Englishman's career.
Once quoted as having made racist remarks, on cuts like "New Lace Sleeves," and "Strict Time," be has seamlessly integrated black music influences into his signature sound.
Once considered a musical revolutionary, Costello idolizes country veteran George Jones enough to sing with him on an HBO special this month. Costello's crooning is at its finest here when it recalls Jones' emotionally-charged swoops and glides in a single breath, especially on "From a Whisper to a Scream."
Ironic, too, is that Costello will probably reach his largest audience as a producer, instead of performer, via Squeeze's "Tempted," already an album radio favorite and rapidly crossing over to Top 40 Both acts share a bent for astute observation of society's absurdity as luminously manifest in everyday lives, but Costello's scope is broader and more ambitious. On songs like "Clubland," he expands the kind of succinct vignettes — favored by Squeeze — into miniature self-contained worlds, chronicled in a style striving for the sophistication of the pop masters like Lorenz Hart and Cole Porter whom he admires.
The inventiveness of these incisive stories doesn't obscure or overwhelm the hook-laden music, however. Alternately crisply buoyant and haunting in its detached melancholy, the melodically fetching passages are transporting in a way foreign to his earlier work. A sonic center dominated by keyboards (instead of the usual guitars) underlines the classicism of Costello's pop melody-writing. But by stretching the narrative bounds of current pop lyrics, he's trying to revitalize this form by improving the content, an approach which nicely dovetails with Nick Lowe's naturalistic attitude toward record-making.
Tangled tales of modern mores are seldom modeled into such seductive slices of pop as the fourteen slices on Trust.
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