Elvis Costello\nWhen I Was Cruel\nIsland Records\nElvis Costello has spent the last decade doing the impossible: growing old gracefully. A good deal of his professional life from the '90s until now has been collaborative, resulting in uniformly excellent albums with the avant-garde string ensemble the Brodsky Quartet, legendary pop songwriter Burt Bacharach and opera singer Anne Sofie von Otter.\nOne thing he hasn't done much of recently is write rock songs. He's making up for that on When I Was Cruel, the first album in six years to feature Costello as the sole songwriter. And despite the long layoff, Elvis proves he can still pick up an electric guitar and spin off tales of bile and bitterness like it's 1977 all over again.\nElvis' cruelty has always been tempered by his typically Northern British self-effacing sense of humor -- he chooses himself as a target as often as his ex-girlfriends or business associates. On the album's title track he recalls a run-in with a journalist who reminisces about "back in '82/You were a spoilt child with a record to plug/And I was a shaven headed seaside thug/Things haven't really changed that much/One of us is still getting paid too much."\nMusically, Elvis has managed to drag Steve Nieve and Pete Thomas of the Attractions back into the fold. Apparently, he and Bruce Thomas are still too busy hating each other to record together. If this sounds like any previous Attractions record, it's probably 1987's bludgeoning guitar attack Blood & Chocolate. Young gun producers Ciaran Cahill, Leo Pearson and Kieran Lynch help modernize the sound a little with some tasteful samples and loops.\nLike every album with Elvis' name on the front, When I Was Cruel rewards repeated listeners, allowing his dense lyrical wordplay to unfold. I don't know what "Every Elvis has his army/every rattlesnake its charm" means, but I like it. Fans who were put off by some of his recent stylistic meanderings (please -- at least give The Juliet Letters a second chance, I beg you) will be pleased with the hooks and relatively straight-ahead rock sound. He'll probably always be cruel, but we'll keep coming back.\n
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