UNDERRATED ALBUMS: Still Mightier Than Most

Music critics, myself included, are mostly full of crap. At least, that's what you say, dear reader and music lover. What do critics know? All we do is overpraise weird, unlistenable hipster bands and slam your heroes. I don't suppose you put any more faith in your fellow consumers of music. Some of the stuff America sends rocketing to the top of the charts makes me want to clean my ears out with a letter opener. It puzzles us all when others don't hear genius in all the same places we do. This week, this music snob will introduce you to some records I think have gone criminally underpraised.

The only thing consistent about Elvis Costello's music over the past thirty years has been its undimmed emotional intensity. His late '70s records burned with nerdy fury, giving us punchy new wave rock songs that were too tuneful to be called punk. "Big Tears" and "Radio Radio" seethe infectiously, sounding every bit as angry as anything out of CBGB. Over the years, Elvis opened up his sound to include country, jazz, and classical elements, to name only a few. Costello's youthful anger may have lessened, just supplemented by new, equally potent emotional outbursts. North, his ravishing collection of piano ballads, may be romantic, but it's not mellow. Listen to the words, and the former Declan MacManus has a lot of raw emotion he just can't keep inside.

1991's Mighty Like A Rose is as emotional as any record he's made. On the surface, it's a shiny piece of early '90s pop/rock, one of the slickest of Costello's career. Following in the footsteps of 1989's Spike, Mighty Like a Rose continued to shave the rough edges off of Costello's sound in the pursuit of something much more polished. Baroque touches color the album. It bursts with horns and strings and overdubbed backing vocals, banjos and sound effects and anything else that was around. But underneath this pop party atmosphere, Elvis was still pissed off and passionate, barking some of his most biting lyrics ("I am your stupid lover, you wretched ghoul.")

Critics were generally not kind. While Rolling Stone gave it a pass, if not a rave, others were quick to proclaim it as Elvis' nadir. Robert Christgau graded Mighty Like a Rose a "C+", writing, "the good songs are overblown tragedies, the bad ones overblown trifles." All Music Guide said "there's so much going on that it's hard to get to the core of the songs." The dense production, credited to Mitchell Froom and Kevin Killen, received the brunt of the criticism, though the buck always stops with the guy whose name is on the album.

These critiques aren't entirely off base. The album is needlessly cluttered and fussy. A bizarre song like "Hurry Down Doomsday (The Bugs Are Taking Over)" would benefit from a more straightforward rock arrangement. "Playboy to a Man" could have been a great Little Richard rave-up, but it ends up sounding like something from Pee Wee's Playhouse. One wonders what Mighty Like A Rose might have sounded like if it had been quick and dirty like 1986's Blood and Chocolate or 2004's The Delivery Man. 1991 saw Elvis stuck in between these career high points, drowning in overproduction.

That's the bad news from an album overflowing with good news. "So Like Candy" is the best of the dozen or so songs Costello co-wrote with Paul McCartney. The song sparkles with Costello's sardonic flair and McCartney's melodic grace. "The Other Side of Summer" parodies the Beach Boys and even mocks McCartney's old songwriting partner, but with a killer hook and dark humor John would have loved. "All Grown Up" has a melody for the ages and "Sweet Pear" sounds like a moodier partner to the Beatles' "Don't Let Me Down."

Mighty Like A Rose is at times beautiful, baffling, and frustrating. It's appropriate it should end with a song that is all those things at once. The waltzing "Couldn't Call it Unexpected No. 4" is perhaps the finest piece of music Costello has ever composed. The lyric is evocative but ultimately inscrutable ("The sudden chill where lovers doubt their immortality/As the clouds cover the sky"). Costello's performance here is a marvel, too, seamlessly alternating between delicate and gruff. But the song's strange, circus-like arrangement is a major distraction, with cheesy trumpets and plinking keyboards carrying on as if writing the best song of your career is some kind of joke.

Costello is really onto something here, most of the time, and his idiosyncratic songcraft shines through the thicket of studio gloss. This is one time Costello couldn't be saved from his own eccentricities. Without them, though, would we love him as much as we do?

TODAY'S RECOMMENDATION: "Couldn't Call it Unexpected No. 4" by Elvis Costello
AVAILABLE ON: Mighty Like A Rose; iTunes