Elvis Costello
When I Was Cruel
Universal

Elvis Costello simply will not stop making music. He's recorded five albums as a solo act; 12 with the Attractions; he's worked on side projects with opera star Anne Sofie von Otter, exquisitely tanned Burt Bacharach, the Brodsky Quartet and saxaphonist John Harle; he's done a tune or two with Tony Bennett, Lucinda Williams and as a featured artist for the Harry Smith Project; he's recorded songs for films including Notting Hill Grace of my Heart and Short Cuts; his first orchestral score, "Il Sogno", is being readied for an adaptation of "A Midsummer Night's Dream," to be performed at UCLA and recorded in London by the London Symphony Orchestra; he even did a guest vocal work for Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks. And just how many songs has this man written? File Elvis Costello under "Song Catalogs That Stagger the Imagination" if you haven't already. You can set him squarely between David Bowie and Ani DiFranco.

Costello's latest disc, When I Was Cruel, is his first solo album in seven years. In his words, it's "a rowdy rhythm record," a calculated return to the mold of 1979's Armed Forces and 1980's Get Happy!! A couple of Attractions — pianist Steve Nieve and drummer Pete Thomas — are on hand. (Bruce Thomas, whom Costello finds "bad-tempered" and "miserable," apparently was not invited.) The bass is thick, the guitars are distorted tremolo, and Costello even employs a "kid's beatbox with big orange buttons" on some tracks for a raw, hip-hop beat. Lyrically, he's back at it, writing, writing and writing, though not, perhaps, with the same vigor as in the early '90s, when songs such as "This Offer is Unrepeatable" exploded with verbiage and affirmed Costello's staying power. There are 15 tracks, all recorded with a roughness around the edges to remind us that Elvis came to rock this time out.

When I Was Cruel has moments of excellence — four, to be exact. Opening track "45" is a great Costello rocker in the tradition of 1978's "Pump it Up." "Episode of Blonde" is Costello's approximation of latter-day Tom Waits, a perverse tango about love gone wrong over which Elvis barks the lyrics in full-on rasp — "She was a cute little ruin that he pulled out of the rubble/ now they are both living in a soft soap bubble," he growls in this lyrical tour-de-force. "Tart" features another one of Costello's shabby dolls, "always a creature of habit when pity would do." The song is nicely augmented with a bell-like piano and sweet Spector-era backing vocals in the chorus, and Costello is in great voice. "When I Was Cruel No. 2" is a Bacharach-drenched ballad that conjures an image of Costello fronting a quartet of beatniks in one of Blake Edwards' alpine nightclubs of his '60s films. The melody is gorgeous, and the tremolo guitar is expertly employed — it's a triumph.

The rest of the disc, however, is unremarkable. Some of it, amazingly, sounds "work-in-progress," like "dust 2&" and its sequel "&dust." The lyrics of these two songs are uncharacteristically flimsy ("If dust could only talk, what would we hear it say?") The self-consciously rollicking "15 Petals" would have fit nicely in the musical overkill experiment that was "Mighty Like A Rose." It certainly makes a lot of noise, but it signifies nothing. And "Alibi," touted as a favorite in Costello's recent concerts, is instantly forgettable.

The problem with Costello may be that he's just too damn musically prodigious. The man has a vast and phenomenal music collection — he fervently listed his 500 essential albums in the 2000 Vanity Fair Music Issue and picked a couple of song highlights from each one — and he has devoted himself to assimilating the wealth of musical styles he's mastered, from honky-tonk to bossa nova and Spike Jones' anti-Nelson Riddle noodlings. He will never be accused of being boring: there's too much going on in his music. He brings too many interesting ideas to the table, and damned if he doesn't want to try every one of them out. (On "Spike" he nearly does.) His enthusiasm cannot be discounted; nor can his importance. He's one of the great singer-songwriters of the past two decades. But there's no purpose behind this return-to-the-rowdy affair; sadly, it amounts to little more than a few good tunes buried in an experiment for the diehards to ponder. Another 15 songs to add to the intimidating pile.

— Christopher Hickman (hickatz at mindspring dot com)