COSTELLO AND BACHARACH: it should have worked, but it didn't

 

1998's Elvis Costello/Burt Bacharach collaboration Painted from Memory was a project that should have worked, but tragically did not. It seemed like a sure thing, two pop music masters in a team up that ought to have been magic. Instead, the enterprise got stuck in a ditch, wheels spinning, engine roaring uselessly. There is an insistence on medium ballads or funeral march ballads, sadder-than-dead fish torch songs. There is merit to a good number of them, as Bacharach is the Beethoven of ageless heartache, but the melancholy turns into a stupefying torpor. It had been remarked on point that Bacharach found his perfect vocalist in Dionne Warwick, a singer with range, timing, and tone who could seamlessly negotiate the deceptively tricky turn -arounds in his  melodies. 

Not so with Costello, who overestimates his native skills to extend his vocal skills. He continually tries to hit the high notes at seemingly the same moment in each song, with his pitch being the equal of having a live magpie taped to your face. It's a horrible, piercing experience before long, and the rationale that it's a brave thing he's doing by using his limited apparatus for the lofty points on the sheet music won't cut ice. Plainly, he's trying too hard.  Bacharach, I recall, wrote a good number of spry up-tempo songs as well, and had a sense of humor. Perhaps he felt he needed to get serious now that he was getting some serious attention from critics because the acclaimed Costello deigned to work with him. The album is dour, gloomy, utterly depressed eventually; it would have been best if they canned half the songs here and released only the truly memorable work. It would have been better if they remembered to bring their sense of humor to the sessions when they recorded this thing. The lack of more spritely paced songs--remember that Bacharach among other virtues had a genius for tempos and alterations of time signatures and keys-- and Costello's inadequate vocal range overwhelmed the bright spots with a sad, impressionistic murk. The main problem for many were the vocals--typical of the user reviews of Painted from Memory on Amazon's listing was that Bacharach was in excellent form, but EC dragged the material down. Perhaps someone can present us new versions of the best material with other singers who would be a better fit for the challenges the songs present.

Costello obviously wants to be a master of all styles of music because he loves, seemingly, every style that's ever been invented. His problem is that he nearly always seems eager to out do or improve on established genres, rather than truly adapt the motifs to his strengths as a songwriter. His output starting in the late eighties with Mighty Like a Rose became distressingly erratic. "Inconsistent" is too polite a word. He did sporadically bounce back with a strong release and solid songs, but his wild swerves to projects that turned out to be perfect messes--The Juliet Letters, The Delivery Man, Mighty Like a Rose, Kojak Variety--resulted in my lowering his stature in my personal canon of all-time greats. Once I thought he was the greatest rock poet, but I took that crown away from him and handed it over to Tom Waits, who had a brilliant career start to finish, all killer, no filler.

From the vault, a too short favorable review of My Aim is True published in my college newspaper

 If nothing else, one of the things that the Seventies have given rock and roll is the chance for a new artist to regurgitate the most glaring of cliches and be considered by older critics who long for their youthful heyday (first cigarette, the first bout with sex, first visit the free clinic) as something in the vanguard of the movement, a "fresh and invigorating voice that outlines the future of rock and roll," and so on. Bruce Springsteen combines elements from Phil Spector records, old rhythm and blues tracks, and bare rock and roll with the lyrical free form-ism of Dylan, resulting in a pastiche of styles that sounds forced, histrionic and bone dry of motivation. Patti Smith wants to merge early Sixties rock, ala Stones, and "Louie Louie" with the legends of dead poets, sounding in the end merely silly. Tom Waits combines black jazz hep jive with Jack Kerouac and sounds stupid. The more jaded among us from this parade of pretenders are leery of anyone trying the same thing. 

My Aim is True by Elvis Costello takes one by surprise. Like Springsteen, the backbone of Costello's music is old rock and roll. But apart from that, they differ radically. Springsteen has a tendency to stretch his material to the breaking point, pouring crescendo upon crescendo, verse upon verse, trying to create an epiphany that never culminates into prosaic glory. Costello, though, is stripped down to a vernacular toughness, and Costello's singing, similar to Springsteen's but more tactful, is full of buoyancy, emotion, and conviction, without any overkill. The songs number twelve in all on the disc, unusual for a rock disc, and each exists as polished lyrical gems of a cynical, penetrating working-class intelligence.

Costello's strength, a virtue that Springsteen, Smith, and Waits lack, is his ability to use rock cliches for their total value. Costello gets the heat to the meat instead of brandishing them like a set of museum pieces that one is supposed to bow to in historical awe and respect. The rockability stuff is done with a verve that equals Buddy Holly, his use of reggae captures the required gloomy, sinister mood, and his boogie material does a lot more than plot the course for the band. His lyrics, though, are imbued with a seventies sensibility, an awareness of absurdity works minor miracles with motifs that one might have considered as resources of comedic irony in this current,post-hip climate. The gifts would be nothing less than restoring to all the old rock and roll and pop music styles the capacity for emotional impact. Though not notable for originality or innovation, My Aim is True is a real piece of work, and Elvis Costello has an intelligence that can develop into something more complex and rewarding. My aim, for now, suffices as an excellent example of rock revisionist traditionalism.

COSTELLO? WAITS?

Elvis Costello had a brilliant run in the Seventies through the Eighties but started to take himself way too seriously. He strayed from his strong suits--subtle, hook-driven melodies, virtuoso wordplay, and real passion--and became as an artist a humorless prig. What was interesting, compelling melodies became an amorphous eclecticism that often times ersatz Broadway blockbuster than music that was genuinely felt. The lyrics, in turn, became convoluted, drunk on their cleverness and thesis-worthy punnage, laden with the serial heartache that traversed from song to song, obscurantism disguising his lack of a good idea to bring to the audience. In contrast, Tom Waits  has just gotten deeper, richer, stranger, more brilliant over the years--his music is a seamless mesh of styles--Brecht-Weil, delta blues , whore house jazz, world music, country, and the like--that consecutive listenings for me yield new surprises, things I didn't notice before, bits of interplay between elements that differ in origin but which come to compliment and commend each other. His lyrics, as well, is the work of a man who has grown in his aging, someone for whom experience has turned into that frail thing called "wisdom", and yet also realizes he hasn't the power to prevent others from making their own mistakes and becoming embroiled in their own tragedies and celebrations. There is a resigned irony in Waits' worldview. There is only a resume and curriculum vitae in what remains of Costello's. The songwriter increasingly reminded of many genuinely talented students in college who lost sight of his own ideas by trying to please every one of his professors and classmates: LOOK AT ME, I AM A MASTER OF ALL FORMS! At best this is mere professionalism; at worst it borders on nervous hackery. Waits had the benefit, I suppose, of having a small audience; he was allowed to go in directions he saw fit and seemed unconcerned with what others thought he should do. His instincts have proved sounder. Costello still writes solid songs when his best instincts are engaged, and he has done at least one album of superb songs and performances, 2002's "When I Was Cruel". This came out after he had released a series of indifferent albums, ie "The Juliet Letters", "Kojack Variety", " Mighty Like a Rose". But that was 11 years ago. Waits had the gift of being a genuine witness to the experience of others; it was his deft skill at not making the people in his stories heroic, iconic or otherwise an embodiment of a hackneyed liberal conceit that made his lyrics so arresting. This is what's meant by negative capability, I guess, the ability, through imagination, to transcend your own context and experience the sensations of others. His accomplishment was a rare one for a songwriter who chose to write about poor people and eccentrics; he could empathize while maintaining an aesthetic distance. It's that "distance", so to speak, that brings into the milieu.

ELVIS COSTELLO BREAKS YOUR HEART

This fan video of Elvis Costello's beautiful song "Indoor Fireworks"  was posted on Facebook the other day, and there came along a dissenting voice in the comment stream that Costello was anti-women. Not an atypical response to Costello's work, his early albums especially, and none too subtle either. The conversation got to the point where the Costello critic remarked that the intensity and persistence of songs about anger, rage, and hatred revealed a homoerotic tension.

Indoor Fireworks
We play these parlour games We play at make believe When we get to the part where I say that I'm going to leave Everybody loves a happy ending but we don't even try We go straight past pretending To the part where everybody loves to cry (chorus) Indoor fireworks Can still burn your fingers Indoor fireworks We swore we were safe as houses They're not so spectacular They don't burn up in the sky But they can dazzle or delight Or bring a tear When the smoke gets in your eyes You were the spice of life The gin in my vermouth And though the sparks would fly I thought our love was fireproof Sometimes we'd fight in public darling With very little cause But different kinds of sparks would fly When we got on our own behind closed doors (chorus) It's time to tell the truth These things have to be faced My fuse is burning out And all that powder's gone to waste Don't think for a moment dear that we'll ever be through I'll build a bonfire of my dreams And burn a broken effigy of me and you 

Elvis Costello is not anti-woman, as any number of love ballads from his prolific pen attest; one might as well say that Dylan is anti-woman, or John Lennon  (for "Run for Your Life") for that matter. People seem to have a hard time when a lyricist goes beyond the usual ABCs of love songs and explores the darker issues, the sources of anger, the true sting of friction between two people. The point is not to make the listener comfortable with some warmed-over platitudes about true love and the heartbreak of it all, but to have the listener recognize the conflicting passions in themselves and to grapple with their own demons. His aim is true. You are ignoring huge swaths of Costello's work which, although noted for its anger and recrimination of failed relationships, has also shown a plenitude of emotional perspectives. I don't know about homoerotic tensions as it applies to his work--it is a reach (and not a reach around) to say that his aggressively male viewpoint in his early tunes hints at a gross case of denial and submersion. It is more accurate and more coherent and less obfuscating to say that his anger is the product of a young man who nursed his hurts, as young males are won't do.I would offer up that Costello doesn't sugarcoat the emotions that most of us are prey to with the contrived resolutions that make discussing this thing acceptable in mixed company. 

This is not Ricky Nelson's neighborhood; Costello, following no less an example than Dylan (and Lennon) creates another metaphorical system over the ache and anger, something closer to the truth. Art is meant to create catharsis, to raise the first thing we garner from an introductory aesthetics lecture, and catharsis is something that Costello creates more often than not. But we have to examine the work further in light of an accusation that Costello is a misogynist by default. He, or his narrators, indicts himself/ themselves in a good many of the songs from the period, and as his career progressed and he got older, his lyric stances in terms of relationships became broader, more nuanced. The song in question, "Indoor Fireworks", shows this, as he speaks in terms of "we", "us", et al. Costello's narrative concept of problematic relationships became much more subtle, centering on the notion that relationships/unions/marriages work out or fail on the energies, talents, expectations and willingness (or lack of willingness) on the part of two people.

3 ELVIS COSTELLO ALBUMS

A Costello review from the 80s, just to show that I once regarded him as the artist who could save rock and roll.

GET HAPPY--Elvis Costello and the Attractions

A sizeable wedge of the unstoppable herd of reviewers and assorted ill-cultured taste mongers have exhausted their supply of superlatives in justifying rock critics defending their declaration that  The Clash's London Calling record the hottest double record set since Exiles On Main Street, I've been tempted to retaliate with an only a half-facetious declaration. Elvis Costello's new record, Get Happy!! (I would have written) is the most remarkable double rock record since Blonde On Blonde. With the gauntlet thrown to the floor, warring factions would man the ramparts and try to pick each other off with sniper-tongued pot-shots. Nonsense on two counts. First, although Get Happy!! Contains 20 songs; it is, in fact, a single record with 10 selections per side, whereas Dylan's double set Blonde On Blonde, with several pieces going well over three minutes, holds less material. More importantly, however, is the nonsense rock reviewers in general (myself included) indulge in when they sling about comparisons that pale once separated from the heat of the moment. 

Common sense and sober thinking show that the Clash is an earnest band that hasn't developed the stylistic subtleties that the Stones used to manage and that Costello, apart from a shared genius for non-sequiturs, has little in common with Dylan. This brings us to what Get Happy!! Really is: neither a masterpiece nor a landmark to be prematurely canonized, but instead a firm confirmation of the significant talent his audience suspected he possessed. The major revelation on getting Happy!! Is that Costello, like many had hoped, has transcended the slight trappings of new wave and has become a songwriter, an artist with a firm grasp on his material who can write songs using an encyclopedic array of song styles to their full measure. The 20 songs on getting Happy!! Comprise something of a brief course in the history of pop music style. Costello, it should be pointed out, is hardly a new wave dilettante who plagiarizes other people's art because he's unable to develop his own voice. Instead, Costello shares methodological affinities with the patron saint of the French New Wave film school, Jean Luc-Godard. Godard, who, through his young life had been surfeited with American genre films by John Ford, Howard Hawks, Nicholas Ray, Sam Fuller, and other Hollywood directors, took to making his own films during the late 60s, using many of the same camera stylistics of his American influences. Godard, aware that he was a French intellectual first and that he couldn't make "American" films no matter how much he admired the visual gracefulness American directors occasionally managed, ended up subverting the genres, inserting heavy doses of philosophy, Marxist literary criticism, semiological dissertations on language, and other notions stemming from the French proclivity for spinning theories, concepts that Godard's American film influences would doubtlessly stand gap-mouth at. Then, film genres to Godard were a medium he could use, alter, retool, change, subvert. Costello is a songwriter, of course, and one wouldn't belabor a comparison between him and Godard beyond a simple point: like Godard, Costello shuffles music styles and makes use of them the way he wants. He does this through his lyrics, which along with Steely Dan's, are the most disturbing, dense, and brutal in rock. 

Frequently, Costello enjoys writing a lyric with no literal meaning against a melody that evokes something else entirely. In "Secondary Modern," with a soft croon over a tune that could pass for some of the blander efforts of Jackson Browne, Costello sings: "This must be the place / Second place in the human race / Down in the basement / Now I know what he meant / Secondary modern / Won't be a problem / Til the girls go home..." As pleasing as anything else could be, the melody says one thing, but the lyrics, full of sparse details and indirect innuendo, deny that pleasure. Costello's aim seems to set us up in the visceral plane and then pull the rug out from under us once the words sink in. Dangerous activity. Lack of space makes it impossible to go into a song-by-song account, but here are some choice tracks. "Motel Matches," set in a gospel vein, is abstracted teenage heartbreak, an implied story of a lover's concern for his girlfriend's loose ways. "Opportunity," a jaunty tune in a stiff gallop tempo that matters, incredible enough, the Hider and Mussolini baby boom campaigns. 

"Man Called Uncle" is an excellent hard rocker where Costello condemns beautiful people who've resigned their free will so that they could become mere sexual playthings to rich people and express a tacit yearning for real love without usury. Costello's central theme throughout is that he's against anything that keeps people from becoming the human being he'd like to see them evolve, against those institutions that divide people, denatures them, turn them into a mindless horde that consumes, kills, and continually destroy each other.

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THE DELIVERY MAN--Elvis Costello and the Imposters

I had the faint hope that Elvis Costello's most recent CD, "The Delivery Man," would be a solid and tuneful set of punchy rock and roll and sharply written lyrics as was Costello's previous "When I Was Cruel" from four years ago, but such is hardly the case. Well, no, that understates the disappointment, which was something akin to questioning my tastes when I was in college and feeling compelled, fleetingly so, to apologize for all the positive reviews I'd given his albums in the Seventies and early eighties when I felt I still had some purchase on informing the culture and the people in it about the best work the best of us were doing. Fortunately, I stopped drinking some years ago and avoided anything so rash; I went to sleep, and the worst despair was gone, but I was still irked, cheesed off, madder than a wet hen. Elvis Costello has been sucking for years now. I was tired of waiting for one of those "return to forms" one anticipates aging rockers to do, hoping they live long enough to make one more disc that has half the kick such musicians might have had back in the day, or the night, or just around when they cared. One way or the other, it amounts to waiting for someone to die, yourself or the artist in question. It's a long game of chicken. It's been long enough to wait for Dylan or the Stones to decide that they want to make music again that sounded like they still enjoyed their work as much as the money they make from it. 

Costello isn't that old, and he hasn't lost his talent; his ambition just got in the way of it. The songs are wandering bits of amorphous mood-setting, vaguely sad, melancholic, inward drawn. The worst of "Painted from Memory" is an irresolutely medium-tempo collection of muzak dirges with Burt Bacharach (both of whom apparently forgetting that Bachrach's work is marked as much by quirky, uptempo tunes) meets the pulseless shoe-gazing sniffling of "North."Costello has been trying to show everyone how much he's matured and grown as an artist and writer. Still, unlike someone like Paul Simon, who improved dramatically in his solo work after he finally bid adieu to the collegiate poesy of Simon and Garfunkel's too-precious word mongering, Costello tries to get it all in, to say it all in one song, and then again in the song after that. His songs tear at the seams, and there is not the overflow of talent you'd like, but rather an uncontainable spillage. Through "Rhymin' Simon" and onward, Simon knows the meaning of restraint, containment, care in image, and metaphor. He remains a songwriter with a solid sense of pop structure, forcing him to make each song the best he can. Costello is, on occasion, a better melodist than Simon and a more attractive, verbally dexterous lyricist. Still, his lack of care sinks him here and throughout most of his output in the '90s. His closet in terms of sheer talent, Tom Waits does the sloppy and the unrestrained with the kind of genius we reserve for Miles Davis and Picasso. Costello is shy of genius, is a brilliant craftsman when he applies the technique, and reapplying himself is precisely what is called for. 

The songs on the new one are unfocused and drift in structure--Costello seems to be trying to convince that playing is indecisive about how he wants a melody to unfold. He is artfully oblique, but he forgets to absorb fifty or so years of rock, pop, and rhythm and blues styles and then compose fantastically upbeat music that was subtly argued at once in the lyrics and intensely rocking with the music. The density of mood he gets across is enough to evoke Hamlet-like assumptions of deep thought and artful equivocation on crucial narrative points.

 Costello had entered middle age with some overblown assumptions that he needs to be artier, moodier, more depressed, diffuse, more obtuse than he was when he was a young punk trying to make a buck off his bad attitude. There are those die-hard fans who would counter that Costello's lyrics are the subtlest and most literary of his career, something I would argue against. Still, all the same, this is a weak defense of the general torpor that saturates "The Delivery Man." Even if so, albums that are more interesting to read than to listen to are fit, on principle, to be used for target practice at the next skeet shoot.
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PAINTED FROM MEMORY--Elvis Costello
and Burt Bacharach 

Two pop music-wise guys team up for a vehicle that should have been a tour-de-force from start to finish but got stuck in a ditch, wheels spinning, engine roaring uselessly. There is an insistence on medium ballads or funeral march ballads, sadder-than-dead fish torch songs, and though there is merit to a good number of them, the torpor wears you out. Costello continually tries to hit the high notes at seemingly the exact same moment in each song, with his pitch the equal of having a live magpie taped to your face. It's a horrible, piercing experience before long, and the rationale is that it's a brave thing he's doing by using his limited apparatus for the high points on the sheet music won't cut ice. Bacharach, I recall, wrote a good number of spry up-tempo songs as well and had a sense of humor. Perhaps he felt he needed to get serious now that he was getting some serious attention from critics because the acclaimed Costello designed to work with him. The album is dour, gloomy, utterly depressed in the long run; it would have been best if they canned half the songs here and released only the genuinely fantastic work. It would have been better if they remembered bringing their sense of humor to the sessions when they recorded this.

LOOK NOW: a brief exchange

TED BURKE:

LOOK NOW--Elvis Costello
and the Imposters

Look Now, the new Elvis Costello, is, at first listening, a highly finessed and fussed -over a collection of songs that seem amorphous, meandering, structurally inert. Lyrically, long Costello's strong suit in addition to being a strong melodist reveals a man who has had a few too many harvests from the same unreplenished acreage. It's understandable that his vivid imagery has been tamed by decades, but we witness here an attempt, over and over, to remain allusive, elliptical, sketching in just enough narrative to provide that this might be a tune that actually has something to say, buried under the happenstance blankness of the lyrics. Those who want to excavate for deeper meanings can leave their shovels and pickaxes in the shed. At age 64, Costello has nothing new to say. Worse, it would seem at his age, is that he now lacks the knack, or interest, to finesse his established themes. This is a missed opportunity of somewhat huge proportions, as it's been one of the more intriguing aspects of being a close observer of songwriters as they age and seeing how they deal with the unavoidable of becoming older, less nimble of body and mind, simultaneously confronting the advantages and shortcomings of getting older. 

We had it in the late work of Lou Reed, a writer who regretted nothing in later albums and who tried to extract something like wisdom and balance from his life  of self-created crisis, or from Leonard Cohen, who kept his oddly effective blend of religious undertones and Laurentian erotics while emphasizing the intellectual paradoxes and oppositions of instinct which a longer view of experience make possible; Cohen embraced it, and went on to offer a late body of songs that took the problematic events of a life and ventured into musings that traced a higher, profound kind of irony. Costello does none of this , really, and appears obsessed with the awful curse of Miles Davis, a jazz genius who found his genius for quick changes in styles and manner of presentation resulting, late , late in life, in work that might be better described as collaborations between rhythm sections, synth players, producers and engineers , with cameo appearances by the top-billed trumpeter. 

Some time ago this artist decided to become a master-of-all-genres and seemingly wanted to be thought of as a Modern Master than as a consistently good-to-great songwriter. This pains me to say this, but this hero of mine has been a superficial, over-stylized drudge for some two decades. There is nothing that was preventing EC from becoming a latter-day Bacharach or Newman, of course. It wouldn't have been an unworthy goal. I think, though, that Costello neglected the aspect of both Bacharach and Newman that, except for occasional lapses, neither lost their sense of song construction. Eclectic as both were about musical sources, their material was generally sharp and melodically defined. The record demonstrates his increased interests in vague atmospherics; the introduction of horn sections seems intrusive, an afterthought. Had these songs been tighter in the arrangement, more purposeful, that is too say, "catchier" for the listener to go along with mood, narrative perspective and psychology, I might have forgiven the slack lyric writing. But I'm afraid this is a case of one bad habit holding hands with another. Finally, the melodies here are slight and ephemeral, a nod, I suppose, at creating moods dark, opaque, with all things said hanging on the sketchily articulated notes in a manner suggesting the mannered atmospherics of substandard horror movies. They don't linger in the mind, much like an Alka Seltzer tablet dropped in water, fizzy, bubbly, full of hisses and subtle sounds, but gone, finally, unmemorable. 

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Barry Alfonso:

LOOK NOW--Elvis Costello
and the Imposters

Sorry to hear it, Ted. You might find this New York Times dialogue between Elvis and Carole King of interest. In his heart, EC was always more like a '70s singer-songwriter than a true punk-rocker, though playing up his Avenging Nerd persona suited him pretty well for a number of albums. He is no longer "fascinated by the weird edge of town" - and more's the pity. I think his best album was Get Happy!!, where he balanced his more conservative and abrasive qualities admirably think EC is trying hard, maybe too hard. 

There's a feel for melody there, kinda early Bacharach or Randy Newman, the sort of stuff he aimed for on Imperial Bedroom. The lyrics are labored, overly clever, with a pang but too premeditated. This isn't a lazy album but maybe an overcooked one. It's a smart person's record that outsmarts itself.  it is generally a really bad sign when a pop/rock musician decides to get SINCERE after building up an audience with the sort of pose or attitude that might be considered theatrical or otherwise self-created. EC seems to have done this in the mid-'80s after repenting various unfortunate public behaviors and outgrowing his angry young man shtick. The thing is, sincerity is also a shtick -- its the whole hand-wringing confessional bit where you drop the "act" and show your "real" face to the public (because you love them, of course). 

Lady Gaga did this a few years ago -- she showed us she was a REAL: singer/songwriter and even posed with a manual typewriter in photos to prove it! Wow! To his eternal credit, David Bowie never laid this kind of bullshit trip on his fans. Bob Dylan has also never made a ballyhooed "honest" record, implying that all of his albums are both honest and artificial. About the only rock artist who ever pulled this off successfully was John Lennon on his Plastic Ono Band album, and that might have been because he actually was going through therapy instead of a bogus act of public self-unmasking.

ELVIS

Elvis Costello did some fine work after the tour de force of  Imperial Bedroom,  most notably with  Spike and especially with When I was Cruel.  The songwriter was nearly as strong as anything he’s done before, although it wouldn’t be a long wait for what we could call the decline of Costello’s quality,  both in his craft and his conviction toward the material. but it warrants saying that Costello's best writing spell came early on in that marvelous string of albums he had, an extended, multi-part set of rants of genuine anger, rage, self-pity. Murderous self-centeredness was his main concern, and he had a peculiar genius for making it profound, or at least evocative, vaguely, of one's own set of unmentionable quantities of explosive self-regard. He was pretty close to how we understand the world punk to mean as a personality type, not a musical style one dons as if it were an overcoat or comfy pajamas. Rather, he was a punk in bang never satisfied, feeling continually and universally betrayed. What made him seductive to an audience, seemingly equal parts men and women, was his ability to manage and modulate the degrees of bile he'd wish to spill; clever with craft, he could switch up points of view, confuse gender for more complex readings, be scathingly satiric , become lyrical and soft hearted. This element, this mastery of many pop music styles, from rockabilly right up to punk rock itself, made his foul cosmology attractive, artful. And he could convey feeling, genuine emotion, or at least seem as if he was doing so. Costello could sell it. Trust, however, was pretty much unredeemable--after a good run, the songs sounded second string, discards, unmemorable B sides. Worse, his vaunted lyric writing lapsed into the incoherent. Imaginative associative leaps--succeeding stanzas that seem to address things and places unrelated to the verse before it but still provide a poetic sense of something only slightly obscured by simile and allusion--became references so private, images and codes so private that seemed not the testament of a poet bringing the senses together for an enlarged perception of things gone sideways than it did a species of private jokes that made their way from the notebook to the printed lyric sheet. And melodically, little on this disc is memorable. Trust was an album by rote construction, a listless, unconvincing make work project. EC did, of course, make two additional albums after Imperial Bedroom that rank, in my view, with this best work, Spike and When I Was Cruel. But the writing was on the wall, as the more styles EC took on, from New Orleans jazz and funk, country and western, classical, and various assortments of avant gard noise construction and Bachrach inspired pop, the less convincing, which is to say less compelling he became. Even Painted from Memory, his collaboration with Bert Bacharach, which should have been supercharged with EC's adroitness as a lyricist and BBs' demonstrated genius for sprite pop with sophisticated turns and fresh, oddball hooks, was mostly studies in mid-tempo amorphousness, broad, off-center piano chords, achingly swallowed word salad, and Costello continually hitting for that thin, adenoidal high note that wears out its formerly effective existence. Both men seemingly forgot, or at least stayed away from the very strengths that might have made that record compelling; these two gents, but Costello especially, set out to make art music, serious stuff. Costello is the artist who has changed over his career, a man who has expanded his range of expression. Said another way, Costello has expanded, not grown, added to his musical palette without seeming to understand or display a feel for the styles he has assumed album to album.