ELVIS COSTELLO & THE IMPOSTERS

look Now CONCORD 8/10 Looking back to look at now. By Stephen Deusner

There are a lot of old friends haunting the verses and choruses of “Under Lime”, the opening track from elvis Costello’s first LP in five years and his first with the Imposters in a decade. That’s Steve Nieve adding buoyant piano pomp and Pete Thomas laying down a springy hi-hat rhythm that keeps the song moving along at a businesslike clip. Joining those two Attractions/Imposters is Davey Faragher, interspersing melodic bass notes throughout the song like raised eyebrows.

And finally there’s the song’s protagonist, Jimmie, a song-and-dance man trying to make a comeback on a televised variety show. Costello introduced him to us nearly a decade ago on “Jimmie Standing In The rain”, off 2010’s National Ransom, where he was a figure of romantic and professional tragedy, left in a deluge at the railroad platform to suffer the indignities of weather and obscurity. In “Under Lime” his fortunes have barely changed, but he remains a welcome presence and, to some extent, an avatar for Costello himself as an artist gleefully out of step with the vagaries of the current pop world.

With its burbling fountains of dancehall horns that sound like a laugh track, “Under Lime” sets the tone for a record that sounds immediately familiar while adding some intriguing sleights of hand. half the joy of a new elvis Costello record is wondering exactly what kind

of elvis Costello record it will be. After establishing himself as punk’s extremely literate id in the late 1970s, he has followed various promiscuous muses to various styles and traditions, as though the punkest thing in the world was rejecting punk for country & western, Brill Building pop, latenight jazz, gritty r&B, even classical composition. Gradually he has built a voluminous and wildly unpredictable catalogue that seemed to end with his 2013 collaboration with the roots, Wise Up Ghost.

Occasionally that catalogue sounded frustratingly compartmentalised, as though Costello had worked to cordon off these divergent genre experiments into separate albums. But the excellent Look Now is more about throwing everything against the wall: he surveys his personal musical history, takes ideas from here and there, and lets them bounce off each other in surprising ways. “Mr & Mrs hush” has the bile and urgency of his punk material, while “Burnt Sugar Is So Bitter”, co-written with Carole King, pulses with a gritty r&B rhythm. “Suspect My Tears” could have been a hit for Dusty or Cilla back in the ’60s, and Burt Bacharach even pops up on “Photographs Can Lie”, reinforcing the song’s melancholy with a pristine piano overture.

Look Now changes shape constantly, each song showing the range of its creator and his collaborators as they indulge so many musical whims. Costello’s voice has gained a bit more texture with age, but he rambles through “Burnt Sugar…” and “Stripping Paper” with customary swagger. he’s always had a wry humour, and occasionally he winks at the audience, but he’s most disarming when he sounds utterly sincere. On “he’s Given Me Things”, he skates up into a tender falsetto, which conveys his sympathy toward the song’s female narrator as well as the realisation of her own power. It’s a lovely moment and a gentle climax to the album.

She is one of several female characters on Look Now, and she may or may not show up in other songs, in particular “Don’t Look Now”. he portrays most of his characters with compassion rather than contempt, which has the unexpected effect of making Look Now sound moored to the present moment, with songs depicting sexual warfare in a way that evokes the #MeToo movement. Likewise, “I Let The Sun Go Down” uses that old saying about the sun never setting on the British empire to figure out why it’s in the dark. What could have been a Brexit complaint instead becomes something much more poignant and rueful, reminiscent of “American Without Tears” and Costello’s other examinations of British identity.

Look Now is a richly tragicomic menagerie of characters, the most compelling of which is Costello himself. here’s an artist who has never been a conventionally confessional singer-songwriter baring the darkest corners of his soul, yet he reveals so much of himself on this album. Like Jimmie struggling to adjust to the new medium of television in “Under Lime”, Costello understands that he’s an artist slightly out of step with the present moment, torn between the past and the present. That conflict makes this an album of tremendous humour and empathy, less a comeback than a considered continuation of an unprecedented career.

Costello is an artist gleefully out of step with the vagaries of the current pop world