All This Useless Beauty

The album is full of thoughtful, resigned songs such as All This Useless Beauty, Poor Fractured Atlas and I Want To Vanish, which I consider to be among the Attractions' greatest performances. Costello's lyrics are finely balanced and his voice is also excellent, pointing to the balladeer pose he's taken up in recent years.

There are rockier moments such as Complicated Shadows and It's Time but generally it's an album of songs 'that I couldn't have written at 22', as Costello put it. It might not impress you if you're a big This Year's Model fan but I'm pleased Costello chose to re-release it with My Aim Is True; it deserves to have a similar reputation.

The bonus disc also has some great tracks on it such as My Dark Life and Almost Ideal Eyes. The demos are interesting, with It's Time and Complicated Shadows being very different stylistically, but they're not really worth too many repeat plays.

In fact, the reissue is slightly frustrating for the completist; Costello has attempted to make the bonus disc a companion to All This Useless Beauty with a few tracks that fit conceptually (the demos of The Comedians and Only Flame In Town) but really have nothing to do with the album. There are a number of B-sides from this era that are not included on the reissue and will remain obscure.

The success of this album hinges around a series of ballads. These are not pompous or overblown, but rather intelligent and carefully constructed exercises in restraint. The playing of The Attractions is consistently superb and the arrangements often deft, the Brodsky Quartet appearing for the closing highlight 'I Want To Vanish'. The title track is outstanding, given rich texture by Steve Nieve's piano work. Opening track 'The Other End of the Telescope', co-written with Aimee Mann, is successful despite its cumbersome title, with Costello at the height of his vocal powers letting a full, tremulous vibrato carry him through the surging chorus.

Many of these songs were written with other singers in mind, and it's easy to detect faithful tributes to some of Costello's heroes. 'Why Can't A Man Stand Alone?', originally intended for Sam Moore, is a soulful song, garnished with a powerful vocal and sounding reminiscent of Sam and Dave's own 'I Can's Stand Up for Falling Down', a song Costello himself famously covered. 'You Bowed Down', written for Roger McGuinn is all Byrdsian chime and harmonised vocals, an unusual sound for Costello to employ.

However, this is not a shamelessly derivative collection of tributes, but rather an intriguing and coherent compendium of material, with Costello leaving his own distinctive imprint on the material. 'Poor Fractured Atlas', a song meditating on the irrational behaviour of men, is beautiful and profound in equal measures - easily one of the best songs Costello has written. 'Distorted Angel' is powerful too, with a perfectly paced lyric which makes for clever melodic phrasing. Its sentiments of childish innocence and Catholic guilt mix well with the eerie production, all spooky keyboards and twanging guitars. The arrangement of 'Little Atoms' is similar and equally thoughtful. Harmonically, this is a simple and not particularly original song - given this additional twist, it becomes a fascinating oddity with an involving sound and melody. The Attractions even get to rock out on 'Complicated Shadows', arguably the least involving song in the collection, elevated to new heights by Bruce Thomas' inventive bass playing.

It's disappointing to think that people might not be open-minded enough to appreciate the versatile depth and variety that Costello's songwriting has developed. If writing ballads is evidence of losing edge and authority, then it's fortunate that these songs are pretty sublime ballads in themselves, with a maturity, intelligence and clarity of emotion lacking in many of Costello's contemporaries. This is not an album of histrionics, but rather an album of defiant restraint. Rumour has it that the new Costello album is another rock n' roll effort - it's good to hear that he's not yet content to repeat himself. Go seek this record out.