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Sometimes Elvis Costello's Mighty Like a Rose seems like a sham. His relentless onslaught of imagery and symbolism gets increasingly complicated until it's hard to be enthusiastic about deciphering his meaning.
His pretentious esoterica is delivered with anger, often in a most non-musical way, and listeners are left with the tedium of assigning value to obscure lines.
Then there's the problem of the uncomfortable sounds — biting vocals and awkward rhythms blended helter-skelter into austere noise. At least on the foreboding "Hurry Down Doomsday (The Bugs Are Taking Over)" the squirmy pace is appropriate.
Costello often makes it difficult to like him. Tracks such as "How to Be Dumb" and "Invasion Hit Parade" are just terrible excursions into self-indulgent ranting.
When Costello pulls it off, the results can be astounding.
His rambling images on "The Other Side of Summer," for instance, are actually logical, cloistered in the song's cheery cadence. Similar results come from the circus rhythm of "Couldn't Call It Unexpected No. 4."
Cohesive-sounding songs do occasionally crop up on "Mighty Like a Rose," such as the engaging phone-romance vignette "Georgie and Her Rival."
And Costello drops a superb trio of heavy-handed dark songs toward the end: Our hero is dumped on "So Like Candy," where he is tremendously effective at mournfulness; "Sweet Pear" (instrumentally supported by The Dirty Dozen Brass Band) is a bittersweet and despondent love song, and "Broken" is pure chill, as Costello proclaims all his strengths and then hauntingly notes, "But if you leave me, then I am broken / And if I'm broken, then only death remains."
His fans would disagree, but Elvis Costello's is not above reproach. His unconventionalism is laudable and his lyricism is often poignant, but sometimes he comes off as self-absorbed.
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