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This year's Elvis: More moods for moderns
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Elvis Costello / Armed Forces
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Armed Forces was originally titled Emotional Fascism. The last minute switch perhaps indicates Elvis C.'s ambivalent but escalating flirtations with commercial success. Still, the revised title stands as a terse summation of Costello's expanding vision.
The metaphor of militarism pervades this, Costello's third superb, compelling work, as a brutal sign of the times. Elvis can no longer be brushed to one side as a malevolent, though absolutely convincing, woman-trodden misogynist-troubadour, Buddy Holly-fifties style, the cringing persona that haunted his warm-up, My Aim Is True. Nor can he be classified within his self-imposed limitations
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of the stunning This Year's Model, whereby Elvis pushed the frustrated social critic to the limit, precar-iously playing jaded devil's advocate to the vulgar fripperies and carnal-ity of the lipstick vogue, pump it up set he loathes so much. To the contrary, Elvis has now be-gun to fashion a vision of "the big picture" the way truly aibitious creators are want to strive. More and more he has become the deta„ch-ed and very moral observer, scan-, ning both the globe and the heart to upend hypocrisy at the personal and political level. Formerly patient and potential psychopath, Costello sings as parapsychologist and politician on Armed Forces, at once grasping and intertwining "emotional fascism" on a human,international scale. Take for instance "Two Little Hit-lers," another in a seemingly endless Elvis catalogue of domestic drama ef-fectively reaching for minor tragedy without an ounce of pretention and full of gallons of coffee-soaked black sobriety: "Two Little Hitlers will fight it out until/One little Hitler does the other one's will." Or there is the bouncy "Oliver's Army," an archtypal pop rush of ec-static Abba-processed melody that sagas modern day Cromwellian mercen-aries. Sings a disgusted Elvis atop the shiny surface of Spectre-like sound emanating from Steve Naive's keyboards(which form irresistible urges to dance the way "Lip Service" did last year): "Only takes one inch of trigger/ One more widow, one less white nigger...Hong Kong is up for grabs/London is full of fabs/ We could be in Palestine over-run by Chinese lines/With the boys from the Mersey and the Thames and the Times." Almost any random line or set of lines in this sweeping album could in fact be quoted to Costello's bene-fit. He is simply that talented a songwriter. His puns are court jester witticisms constructed from the ver-bage of contemporary phraseology. "Have you got yourself an occupation;"
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Remaining text and scanner-error corrections to come...
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