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It's cul-de-sac time, as our hero reunites with his heyday band, the Attractions, and heyday producer, Nick Lowe, but discovers you really can't go home again. And why should he even want to, given his brilliant last album (King of America) in which his maturing pop genius meshed wonderfully with an American country, blues and rockabilly format? Not to mention turning his back on his stage name and making a big thing in the press about getting real.
Such contradictoriness is often the mark of a good artist, but Blood & Chocolate isn't. The album seems self-consciously anti-commercial and retro-garage-bandish, with Lowe indulging an industrial-noise sound that lies unimpressively between Metal Machine Music and the last eight bars of David Bowie's Diamond Dogs album. There are also some excruciatingly repetitive five- and six-minute songs (Six minutes, Elvis? From a guy who once swore that nothing was worth saying in more than three?), and barely a lyric conceit or couplet that transcends anything from Costello's first album.
More damaging than this, though, are the weak, thin, misfiring vocals, no doubt intended to convey raw feeling but hopelessly mismatched with the material. Costello at his best is a powerful singer, but it's not a voice meant to carry long songs so much as bite into succinct, compressed ones. Thematically, there's a return to lyrics of murderous emotion, of love-as-mental-cruelty, but the material is cheap and singsong, as on "I Hope You're Happy Now," and so is the wordplay ("Home Is Anywhere You Hang Your Head").
Only on the three songs in the middle of side two — "Blue Chair," "Battered Old Bird" and "Crimes of Paris" — does Costello serve up characters, melodies and performances worthy of him, but they nonetheless sound forced. As for the Attractions, they are lost in the murk, and hopelessly in the shadow of a big talent who worries too much about his album-to-album moves.
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