After Punch The Clock and Goodbye Cruel World, a pair of flawed LPs that, somewhat perversely, featured some of his biggest hits, Costello returned to critical respectability with a pair of 1986 records: King Of America and Blood And Chocolate. (It's hard to believe now that these two were cited as "comeback" albums, given that they came a mere half-decade after Costello's most popular work.) Blood And Chocolate marked Lowe's return to the producer's chair, and it was also Costello's final album with The Attractions for a long stretch, and his final album for CBS/Columbia in the U.S. Though hailed at the time as a welcome return to the edgy rock sound of This Year's Model, Blood And Chocolate now sounds messy, as if Costello couldn't reconcile his increasingly abstract song structures with his band's straight-ahead bash. Still, it's an invigorating, tuneful mess, and a hard record to dislike. Naturally, one of the album's best songs is also one of its shortest: "I Hope You're Happy Now," which keeps Costello's absurdist, Dylan-esque imagery to a minimum (well, aside from "like a matador with his pork sword… in his turquoise pajamas and motorcycle hat"), while keeping the rhythm punchy and the vocals slightly wrecked. And as always, the hero of the song is Nieve, laying on an organ that sounds like it was sampled from a horror movie projected inside of a roller rink.
"I Hope You're Happy Now" by Elvis Costello & The Attractions
Costello brought Nieve and the rest of The Attractions back eight years later for Brutal Youth, by which time he'd developed a better notion of how to use his old friends to bolster his new songwriting style, which leaned heavily on moony ballads and freeform rock. Brutal Youth relies too much on the former, but it also contains one of Costello's all-time best fist-pumping stingers, "13 Steps Lead Down," a snarky take on addiction and recovery that features what's easily Costello's most blazing guitar solo. When The Attractions performed the song on David Letterman, the host—long a Costello booster—was so knocked out by the performance that he booked the band again just a couple of months later, and urged the audience to "watch that fella play guitar."
"13 Steps Lead Down" by Elvis Costello & The Attractions
Advanced Studies
Even Costello diehards tend to pick and choose tracks from the basically solid 1983 album Punch The Clock and its downright dodgy '84 follow-up Goodbye Cruel World, both of which continue Imperial Bedroom's pop ambition without really building on it. Punch features some of Costello's surest pop efforts, such as "Let Them All Talk" and "Every Day I Write The Book," but its claim to immortality comes from the devastating eve-of-the-war song "Shipbuilding," a songwriting collaboration with producer Clive Langer, featuring a heartbreaking Chet Baker trumpet solo.
"Shipbuilding" by Elvis Costello & The Attractions
Costello took a couple of years off and switched record labels, following the one-two punch of King Of America and Blood And Chocolate. He made a high-profile return with Spike, a solo effort featuring a rotating cast of guest stars (Chrissie Hynde, Roger McGuinn, The Dirty Dozen Band, and Paul McCartney, who served as Costello's songwriting foil for a stretch in the late '80s). The album suffers from a lack of focus and a bit too much of the production sheen so in favor at the time, plus some duds so deadly that it's hard to reckon why they were included in the first place. It also sports the heartbreaking hit single "Veronica," inspired by Costello's grandmother's dementia, and enough gorgeous songs like the sad, cybersex-anticipating "Satellite" that it's easy to forgive the skippable tracks. All that goes double for Spike's 1991 follow-up Mighty Like A Rose, home to three of Costello's best songs (The dark-side-of-the-Beach Boys "The Other Side Of Summer," and the devastating ballads "So Like Candy" and "Couldn't Call It Unexpected No. 4") and some of his worst. (The title "Hurry Down Doomsday (The Bugs Are Taking Over)" pretty much says it all.)
"Satellite" by Elvis Costello
"The Other Side Of Summer" by Elvis Costello
When All This Useless Beauty was released in 1996, it was pitched as a collection of older songs that Costello had never gotten around to recording—some of which he'd written for other artists to perform—so it was dismissed in some quarters as underbaked and somewhat dreary. But it's actually a linchpin album, featuring Costello's most eclectic, accomplished set of material since the early '80s, as well as marking a clear transition toward Costello becoming primarily a torch singer working in collaboration with others, as opposed to a fiercely independent, rock-minded singer-songwriter. As Costello ballads go, few can top "The Other End Of The Telescope," written with (and for) Aimee Mann, and built around the central image of smallness as a way of expressing how it feels to be jilted. The song's repeated phrases and lilting melody represent Costello's then-fullest homage to the work of Burt Bacharach and Hal David, whose songs he'd been covering since his earliest days on the stage. (This was also the apparent end of the line for The Attractions. Drummer Pete Thomas and keyboardist Steve Nieve have continued to play with Costello, but tensions between Costello and bassist Bruce Thomas developed into full-blown estrangement.)
Also in 1996, Costello actually collaborated with Bacharach on the song "God Give Me Strength," the centerpiece of the Grace Of My Heart soundtrack. Then in 1998, Costello and Bacharach released a full album of co-written/co-produced songs, Painted From Memory, which conveyed Costello's '90s preference for balladry with refreshing sophistication, aided by Bacharach's airy, aching orchestrations. Freed from having to think in conventional pop structures, Costello cooked up songs like "This House Is Empty Now," which eschew rhyming and hooky choruses in favor of something more impressionistic. Painted From Memory is a difficult album to enter, but the deeper listeners get into it, the harder it is to leave.
Following Painted From Memory, Costello worked on offbeat projects with Bill Frisell and Anne Sofie Von Otter, then released his next solo album, When I Was Cruel, in 2002, to much ballyhoo and talk about how the rollicking Costello of Blood And Chocolate was back. But like Blood And Chocolate, When I Was Cruel is fairly scattershot, and not as immediately engaging. Even worse was the album that followed, North, a set of unmemorable jazz-inflected ballads written under the influence of Costello's new wife, chanteuse Diana Krall. But Costello came back strong in 2004 with The Delivery Man, his second album to feature "The Imposters"—basically The Attractions minus bassist Bruce Thomas—and his most consistent foray into roots-rock since King Of America (or maybe even My Aim Is True). The album features some clunkers, and its dark shadings keep it from being much "fun," but songs like "Country Darkness," "Nothing Clings Like Ivy," and the title track are haunted by spiritual unrest and deep twang. In "The Delivery Man," Costello sings about the arbiter of divine justice and ends with these two repeating lines: "In a certain way, he seemed like Jesus / In a certain light, he looked like Elvis." But which Elvis?
Demerits
Of Costello's '70s and '80s work, only 1984's aiming-for-the-charts effort Goodbye Cruel World now sounds like a failure, albeit one with some good songs held back by overly aggressive production, like "Love Field," "The Comedians," and "Peace In Our Time." Even Costello has his doubts about it, once referring to it as "the worst album of my career."
Newcomers have to be more selective when choosing albums from the '90s on. For every highlight like Brutal Youth and Painted From Memory, there's a North or The Juliet Letters, a collaboration with the acclaimed string ensemble The Brodsky Quartet that produced chin-stroking appreciation at best, puzzlement at worst. Even worse: Kojak Variety, a largely lifeless covers set (though it does feature a nice take on The Kinks' "Days") and Il Sogno, a ballet score. We get it: You like all kinds of music. But that doesn't mean you can write and perform them all equally well.
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