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Fans have had to scurry to keep up and catch up with Costello, who has put out a portfolio of no less than 54 songs in the last year.
Trust is his sixth album, and it's excellent. Costello's singing — which may be the first and last bar to his popularity — has never been more effective. He's even enunciating more clearly, although the rave-up "Luxembourg" is one of his least decipherable lyrics.
His first album, My Aim Is True, threw everyone off. It was an album of impotence, rage, furtive tenderness and wit.
It sounded rawer than he has ever sounded since and many people think he has simmered down, become tamer. But Costello moved on. The only thing he has carried with him from album to album is his wit, and his wits.
Trust advances through hard-bitten tributes to the passing show, baroque political-psychological tracts, obscure moral rant, all providing continuity with his other albums.
In "Clubland," the opening cut, patrons are "Going off limits / Going off duty / Going off the rails / Going off with booty." Costello is one with his audience, in a strange way.
Costello can be easily defined by his deft lyrics, economical yet intricate music, desperately nasal voice and sense of a musical past.
From Lorenz Hart (and whom?) Elvis Costello learned that love is not to be trusted. Turn your back on it for an instant and it's gone, or transformed into some unrecognizable alien monster.
He can be Oscar Wilde-cocktail party sharp with an epigram ("There's no such thing as an original sin").
He is frustrated and devious, and lately, charming, all at once. The sour bossa-nova of "Lovers Walk" on Trust is steeped in knowledge of where and when the music began. Costello has a pop music mind like a steal trap.
The songs can be startling or they can be stroking, but with claws. Costello will hit when the victim is down (sometimes unattractively). His opening lines can send you sprawling.
He is also one of only a few songwriters to deal openly with rock's submerged hostility toward women. Trust is marbled with cross-sections of unhealthy, but not uncommon relationships, seen from above, below, backwards, any way that might make sense.
But then he will turn around and sink delicately into a line like "It's easier to say 'I love you,' Than 'yours sincerely,' I suppose / All little sisters / Like to try on big sister's clothes."
My guess is that Costello is too smart for the mob and not simple or esoteric enough for the snob. Behind the seeming raggedness is a Tin Pan Alley tunesmith gone berserk.
Trust at your own risk.
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