ELVIS COSTELLO AND THE ATTRACTIONS Goodbye Cruel World (Columbia)

by Mitchell Cohen

It's almost Elvis Costello and the distractions this time out. Goodbye Cruel World, LP #10 (here in America, at least), has such a desperate busyness to it that it's tough to get a fix on its strengths. The arrangements are so errant from the thrust of the material, it's as though—to go to the West End of the moment—The Real Thing were directed in the manner of Noises Off. The comparison isn't as random as all that, actually; like Tom Stoppard, Costello gets simply dizzy over the possibilities of language. There's a silent chuckle when he tosses off a particularly satisfying rhyme or lobs a potent little word grenade over the fence. In The Real Thing, Stoppard has his playwright/hero say, 'What we're trying to do is write cricket bats, so that when we throw up an idea and give it a little knock it might...travel.'