Elvis Costello
"This Year's Model"

(British version, Radar, 1978)
(British version, Radar, 1978)

By SCOTT ROSENBERG Adolescent pop music is all about wanting things that feel just out of your reach. Yet Elvis Costello's 1978 "This Year's Model," pop's most perfect distillation of adolescent pain, opens with a bold denial of desire: "I don't want to kiss you, I don't want to touch," Costello hisses, unaccompanied, before guitar, organ and drums kick into "No Action's" glinting fury. The line is the keystone for an album that's an encyclopedia of "don't"s and "don't want"s: "Don't ask me to apologize," "I don't want to check your pulse / I don't want nobody else / I don't want to go to Chelsea," "I don't want anybody saying 'You belong to me,'" "I don't like those other guys looking at your curves," "I don't wanna be hung up, strung up, when you don't call up," "Don't say you love me when it's just a rumor," "I don't want to be a lover -- just wanna be your victim." On "This Year's Model," Elvis chooses not to fantasize about the fulfillment of unrequited desires but to savor the exquisite torture of their prolonged frustration. These songs pick away at itchy scabs of jealousy until they bleed with feeling and flay rough calluses of rejection down to raw reflexes of revenge. The clumsy steps of the "Mystery Dance" Elvis sang about on his 1977 debut, "My Aim Is True," here become more familiar but no more satisfying to "This Year's Girl's" coveted model, "The Beat's" guilt-ridden fumbler, "Hand In Hand's" spurned brute, "Living in Paradise's" spying schemer and "Lipstick Vogue's" mechanical lover. The kind of pumping "Pump It Up's" relentless triplets pound out never had much to do with the drugs listeners thought Elvis was singing about; the rhythm is of hearts and hips, pumping away mindlessly on a dance floor of the damned. Every bar of "This Year's Model" is catchy. It's Costello's most unified album, cobbling together an irresistible sound from mid-'60s hooks, quavery "96 Tears"-style organ riffs and hyperactive bass lines that bounce around like pogo sticks. The emotions these songs wallow in are just about intolerable, and the lyrics offer little escape. Even the catchiness of the tunes is suspect: In "Night Rally's" Orwellian nightmare, "catchy little melodies" serve as an insidious vehicle for neofascist conformity. Nonetheless, the music's ravenous energy and infectious tunes are themselves, if not an escape, certainly a partial antidote to the lyrics' torments. The very sounds of "This Year's Model" offer a kind of consolation to the pangs of adolescent longing -- not by providing the simple relief of somebody else expressing one's pain, but by transmuting the anguish, melting it down and forging it into something rich and potent, something you want to turn up loud and listen to over and over again. For all its smoke and tears, the album demonstrates that the bitter residue of coming-of-age and loss of innocence doesn't have to become a weapon aimed at other people; it can be made instead into a creation to share with them. If you were 18 when "This Year's Model" was the current year's model, these sounds might just have saved your sanity. If you were as enthralled by them as I was, you could hear that, for all Costello's snarled denials, for all his refrains of "I don't want," he wanted, he wanted.

Download a clip (1MB) of "The Beat"
from "This Year's Model"

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