by Elvis Costello

Unlike other rock artists with superb debuts, Elvis Costello's sophomore release only improves on the strengths of his first release. The lyrics are sharper, the songs even more energetic, the production cleaner, and the players an actual road-tested band rather than the studio players. While I personally still enjoy My Aim is True slightly more (likely because I heard it first), most critics see this album or even its follow-up, Armed Forces, as Costello's early pinnacle.

The sound and song structures are similar to his first album, but songs like "No Action" and "You Belong to Me" benefit from the improved backing band, both drums and organ. This base provides a more consistent sound that had been lacking in the previous album. The production also takes advantage of multi-tracking Costello's voice, so on many songs, like "Living in Paradise," he provides his own background vocals. Unlike later albums, the vocal track is clean and it is easy to understand the lyrics, something that should be de riguer for a man who has been called "a singing dictionary."

The highlight of this set is "Pump It Up," that takes full advantage of the drum-organ combo, with the heavy beat that starts the song and continues to drive it throughout and the perfect chorus where the organ becomes almost as strong a percussion instrument in the beat-beat-triple-beat repetition. Just as good is the song "Radio, Radio," which flips the organ-drum combination so that the organ takes the lead and is supported by a somewhat muted snare. This song also has some of the best lyrics in rock, from the meta-descriptive "I want to bite the hand that feeds me...I want to make them wish they'd never seen me" to "radio is in the hands of such a lot of fools trying to anesthatize the way that you feel." (This song also is a piece of television history, as Costello famously switched to this song rather than the one he had been scheduled to play during his appearance on Saturday Night Live, on the TV network that also owned and operated much of the radio at the time.)

There's no one theme that connects the songs, unless you consider a general disdain for the subjects of his songs a theme. If Costello came across as angry with his first album, herein he not just reinforced the idea but added even more bite to his bark. However, it's only a step towards the nuclear assault that would be his next album, Armed Forces.