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In the past year. Elvis C. has dismissed his most recent work as "a load of wank," dropped his stage name, recorded King of Americo, taken up with an Irish punkette, taken back his stage name and band, and recorded this album, a return to the pre-wank sound and vision of This Year's Model and Armed Voices.
The most surprising thing about Blood and Chocolate is its complete dissimilarity from King of America: the songs are livelier, the instrumentation is louder. the vocals broader. A lot of the tracks — "Home is Anywhere You Hang Your Head," "Blue Chair" and "Battered Old Bird" especially — sound like unreleased songs from Trust. It's a formula Costello, the Attractions and producer Nick Lowe know well, and "Blue Chair" is an example of the ease with which geniuses can create art in their chosen style.
The more ambitious and hard-edged tracks fare somewhat less well. "Uncomplicated," which opens the album, has an appealingly primal Bo Diddley sound that Elvis has never achieved before. but "Tokyo Storm Warning" and "Poor Napoleon" have none of the intensity of hard-rock Costello classics like "Beyond Belief" or "Peace, Love and Understanding." They do have a '60s feel this recalls Costello's girlfriend's band, the Pogues, but someone with his skill at constructing a musical atmosphere can rightly be expected to produce something more weighty than gin-soaked garage rock.
The album's best track is a slow piece called "I Want You," in which Elvis explores the meanings of that simple phrase in four minutes of brilliant, insistent imagery. The musical setting is pretty obviously based on the Beatles track by the same name on Abbey Road, and the building blues riffs provide perfect emphasis to Elvis' building lyrical message.
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