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If Elvis Presley was "The King" of rock 'n' roll, then Elvis Costello is indisputably at least the Dark Prince of new wave rock. He and his band, The Attractions, demonstrated what new wave is all about during a sold-out, jam-packed concert at the Capitol in Passaic Saturday night.
In an hour-plus set that included over two dozen songs, Costello and the Attractions covered a wide spectrum of styles, from Bo Diddley rhythms to reggae beats, from rockabilly to straight rock, and from a majority of Costello songs to a couple of odd, and attractive, covers: "Don't Look Back" and "She's (He's) Got You," the latter a country hit of Patsy Cline's.
Costello's songwriting style is eclectic musically, and he appropriates bits and pieces of rock history to help shape his tunes. The eclecticism is typical of new wave, a very apt descriptive title, since the wave is washing up from the sea of past rock.
The new wave is also fond of fast tempos and very tight rock ensemble work, and here the Attractions are definitely on the money and in a class by themselves. Their music is tightly focused and at the same time bursting with little melodic and harmonic fills — mostly the work of febrile keyboardist Steve Nieve.
Drummer Pete Thomas is a model of tight, crisp precision, working with a small drum kit and getting the most out of snare drum and high-hat cymbal. Bassist Bruce Thomas plays lean, melodic lines more than he keeps time, but with Costello's rhythm guitar and Thomas's flailing metronome, he doesn't have to.
About midway through the set, Martin Belmont of the Rumour joined the group on guitar, freeing Costello for a couple of brief solos, and taking a couple himself, but basically adding more rhythmic and harmonic weight to the sound.
And for an encore, Glenn Tilbrook of Squeeze, the opening act Saturday night, joined Costello vocally and on guitar on a rave up version of "From A Whisper to a Scream," from Costello's new album, Trust.
Elvis Costello & The Attractions are obviously very good at what they do, and the crowd at the Capitol was on its feet for most of the show, howling approval, but somehow I don't find the group, or its music, very attractive.
First of all there's those 25 or so tunes in 75 minutes. It's like a jukebox gone out of control. After a while all those melodic hooks — and Costello is very good at writing those little four- and eight-bar attractions that now pass for melody in pop songs — keep coming on like a barrage of popcorn or cocktail peanuts, the kind you can't stop eating but can't stop hating either.
I would have liked to hear the band stretch out on a couple of numbers, but the only difference from Costello's records was an occasional change in the tight arrangements and interpretations. Also, and more crucial for the non-Costello fanatic, the words of the songs often get lost in the musical mix in concert, so you have to know them beforehand or you really can't catch what Costello is singing about.
If Costello wrote harmless little ditties that wouldn't be so bad. But he doesn't; he writes some of the most sophisticated, ambiguous and metaphorical lyrics in rock.
His lyrics remind me of John Skelton and August Strindberg. Skelton was an English poet of the metaphysical school, so-called because of its propensity for elaborate metaphors and philosophical puns and riddles. Yet Skelton wrote in a sing-songy quatrain more associated with nursery rhymes. Costello, in sticking to the pop song form with lyrics often as convoluted as Skelton's, seems as perverse as the English poet about form and content.
Strindberg was a late 19th Century Scandinavian playwright whose misogyny was only general when he didn't have women, or more specifically the relationship between men and women, to hate: Like Strindberg, Costello sees sexual and social relations, love between the sexes, through a glass, darkly. Costello sees a social fascism in the way male-female partners try to control each other.
Costello also sees detectives, police and secret police watching us. In fact his lyrics are full of all kinds of personal paranoias, sarcasms and angers. One of his most ironic songs is called "What's So Funny 'Bout Peace, Love and Understanding?"
It's hard for me to find all this attractive, especially when most of the words are lost. But obviously Costello's fans do, for they cheered approvingly, even when the words were castigating them.
Costello himself was almost benign, in contrast to most of his lyrics. He wore an Edwardian jacket, silvery paisley vest and black and white polka dot cravat, his famous horn-rimmed glasses — tinted orange-brown — and looked heavier than in pictures, almost bloated. He also did much less snarling than on record, Introduced some songs by name, and said "Thank You." Maybe he's mellowing.
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